Antoine Watteau

“ Watteau, born on the Flemish border, is almost an exception. Temperament in him seems constantly on the verge of conquering tradition and environment. Now and then he seems to be on the point of emancipation, and one expects to come upon some work in which he has expressed himself and attested his ideality. But one is as constantly disappointed. His color and his cleverness are always admirable and winning, but his import is perversely—almost bewitchingly—slight. ”

“ Houssaye's book, as they generally are in whatever society or whatever time we find them, all the world over. Watteau is familiar to us all, if not from his works, at second-hand in engravings, or those dainty little china shepherdesses and shepherds which we have seen on our grandmothers' mantel-pieces, and which are again [Pg 302] emerging from the glass corner cupboard to the rosewood and mirrored étagère. The following passages descriptive of his early life, are full of animation:
"He was born in 1684, at the time the king of France was bombarding Luxembourg. ”

“ Watteau's dames and gallants are touched with happy melancholy. Their light malady of heartache for unattained desires is obviously more beautiful pictorially than the headaches of hilarious boors.
Your true artist has delicate antennæ and is sensitive to everything that he sees and feels; but when he retires within himself, the memory of all that he felt, of warmth or cold, [Pg 54] fine or unfine, returns to him. The influence of many men Watteau felt. I place them in the order of their influence—Teniers, Rubens, Gillot, Audran, Titian, and Veronese. ”

“ Instinctively language becomes flowery, and light and lovely words rise spontaneously to re-echo in another medium the music of his pictures.
According to our temperament and taste we are influenced by the familiar-and-candid friend standpoint of De Caylus; by the De Goncourts' searching analysis clothed in apt and sparkling words; by M. Camille Mauclair's soul-search into the effect on Watteau's life of the disease from which he suffered, or by the calm and cultivated mind of Walter Pater with its rare and sympathetic insight, and that "tact of omission" which he extolls in Watteau. ”

“ A mild melancholy possesses the inhabitants of this dream-world, for they are happy and yet a little sad, musing on what can never be. Through this dream-world "L'Indifférent" trips lightly, typical of Watteau, rainbow-hued, mercurial, his indifference assumed, not troubling to conceal the sad thoughtfulness that lurks in his expression. We do not believe in his snapping fingers and his jaunty air. What colour are his beautiful garments? ”

“ Our incomparable Watteau is no more! Jean-Baptiste returned unexpectedly. I heard his hasty footsteps on the stairs. We turned together into that room; and he told his story there. Antony Watteau departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix for the good cure of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.
He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all. ”

“ The fact remains that none—none among all the most infatuated frequenters of the perverse fairy-land of Watteau's exquisite dreams—gives himself up more wantonly to the artifice within artifice, to the mask below mask, of these dancers to tambourines amid the "boulingrins du pare aulique" of mock-classic fantasies. He gives himself up to this Watteau cult all the more easily because he himself has so infantile a heart. He is like a child who enters some elaborate masked ball in his own gala dress. It is natural to him to be perverse and wistful and tragically gay. ”

“ The year 1716 was big with significance to Watteau; he awoke in his own land—dream-land of his Pastorals. Then he began to live, and there were before him but five short years of life. He never again left this land of fantasy—except when, on his return from London, he painted "Gersaint's Sign," that model of modishness and grace, painted in eight mornings, representing Gersaint's shop where élégantes buy masterpieces from shop-keepers as elegant as themselves. ”

“ Gillot is certainly one of Watteau's earliest inspirers: his revolt against convention (even if revolt be too strong a word) influenced Watteau to the end of his life. With this happy rencontre began the serious development of Watteau's art. Life, no longer sordid, became luxurious in thought and application. Supersensitive, the artist mind of the pupil touched and extracted the taste of his master, improved upon it, and strengthened its own tendency for all that was dainty, elegant, and whimsical. Gillot's was a good influence ”

“ All the later theories of light and its effect upon the objects in nature are foreshadowed by Watteau's fêtes champêtres, which give at the same time a characteristic, though highly idealized, picture of the artificiality of the life of his time. He is the initiator of the Louis XV. period, but, except in a few rare cases, his paintings are entirely free from the licentiousness of his followers Lancret and Pater, and even more of Boucher and Fragonard. ”

“ He proved their compatibility; he showed that all the world is a vision seen through a temperament.
It is unjust to attribute to Watteau's influence only the frivolous school of painters which immediately followed him; they were incidents of the reaction of their time against the dull and the pedantic. They copied him, but they missed his sincerity; they lacked his genius; they were begotten of their age when dulness tired of being good and grew wanton. But [Pg 63] even his followers have more of life and warmth and beauty than his predecessors, the frigid and attenuated school of Le Brun. ”

“ Margot descended from the boards, Gilles became a man as before, the theatre was taken down, Watteau still on the watch; but by degrees he became sad; his friends were departing, departing without him, with their gauze dresses, their scarfs fringed with gold, their silver lace, their silk breeches, and their jokes.—"Those people are truly happy," said he, "they are going to wander gayly about the world, to play comedy wherever they may be, without cares and without tears!"—Watteau, with his twelve-year-old eyes, saw only the fair side of life. ”

“ Watteau, the melancholy enchanter who has made nature sigh so heavily in his autumn woods, full of regret around dreamful pleasure! Watteau, the Pensieroso of the Regency; Fragonard, the little poet of the Art of Love of the time.
Have you noticed in L'Embarquement de Cythère all those naked little forms of saucy and knavish Loves half lost in the heights of the sky? Where are they going? They 263are going to play at Fragonard's and to put on his palette the hues of their butterfly wings. ”

“ He was a historical painter of some celebrity. His chief productions are the cupola of St. Paul’s cathedral, which Queen Anne commissioned him to paint, and the decoration of several palaces. He was the first English artist to be knighted, and he sat in Parliament several years. No doubt his greatest honor was to be Hogarth’s father-in-law.
“Watteau,” vätˌtōˈ. (1684-1721.) A French painter of much original power, who holds about the same place in the French schools as Hogarth in the English. ”

“ Watteau and Fragonard. It was Fragonard, says Sir Claude Phillips, "whose frank passion, whose irresistible élan lighted up the decline of the century much as the imaginativeness of Watteau, his reticence and wistful charm even in the midst of voluptuousness, lighted up its first years. He is the Ovid of French painting." He was born at Grasse near Cannes; and the pupil, in Paris, first of Chardin and then of Boucher (see 1258, 1090) . Having won the Prix de Rome in 1752, he travelled in Italy, drawing all the sights and monuments, and studying the old masters. ”

“ At close of day, when they fly back to their mother, there is never an unmated name in the report they bring her; and she, belike, being pleased with them, allows them to sit up late, and to have each a slice of ambrosia and a sip of nectar. But elsewhere they have hard work, and often fly back in dread of Venus' anger. At that other balustrade, where Watteau, remembering this one, painted for us the 'Plaisirs du Bal,' how often they have lain in ambush, knowing that were one of them to show but the tip of his wings those sedate and migniard masqueraders would faint for very shame ”

“ Watteau, suspicious of his master's motives, determined to leave him, advancing as excuse his desire to return to Valenciennes. He found a purchaser, at the modest price of 60 livres, in Sirois, the father-in-law of his later friend and patron Gersaint, and was thus enabled to return to the home of his childhood. In Valenciennes he painted a number of the small camp-pieces, notably the “Camp-Fire,” which was again bought by Sirois, the price this time being raised to 200 livres; this is now in the collection of Mr W. A. Coats in Glasgow. ”

“ The career of Watts as a public man began in 1843 when he had reached the age of 26. The British Government, not often guilty of fostering art or literature, may claim at least the credit for having drawn him out of his seclusion at the very moment when his genius was ripening to bear fruit. In 1834 the Palace of Westminster, so long the home of the Houses of Parliament, had been burnt to the ground. ”

“ There the young man who went away sorrowful with bowed head, scarcely knowing what he has lost, is used by Watts as one of his most powerful criticisms of modern life. Although the incident is a definite isolated one, yet the costume, figure, chain of office, and jewelled fingers, clutching and releasing, are of no time or land in particular. ”

“ We are fond of taking credit to ourselves for the initiation of the modern school of landscape. We remember with pride the day in 1824 when the French Salon was illumined with three of Constable's pictures; we also remember the acknowledgment by French painters of the inspiration of Turner and Bonnington; but it would be interesting to follow back their inspiration; and it would not be difficult to trace Monet's division of tones and envelope of air to Watteau.
Influence in art and inspiration is a ball that is tossed back and forth. ”

“ Furthermore, Watts was not in any sense a mystic—neither personally or as an artist. "The Dweller in the Innermost" is not the transcendental self known to a few rare souls, but is merely conscience, known to all. ”

“ This man, however, never appears in the pictures; when once in his studio, alone facing his canvas, Watts is final, absolute, an undisturbed and undistracted unity, conscious of that overwhelming "rightness" known to a Hebrew prophet. Whatever Time or Death may have in store for him or any man, there riding swiftly above them is Judgment the Absolute One; whatever theories may be spun from the perplexed mind of the magazine writer about Expansion and Necessity, there sits the terrible "Mammon" pilloried for all time. ”

“ In "The All-pervading," there sits the Spirit of the Universe, holding in her lap the globe of the systems, the representation of the last conclusions of philosophy. This mysterious picture is very low in tone, conforming to Watts' rule to make the colouring suit the subject. Here there is nothing hard or defined; the spirit of the universe is merely suggested or hinted at, his great wings enclose all. The elliptical form of this composition is seen again in "Death Crowning Innocence" and "The Dweller in the Innermost," and the same expressive indefiniteness and lowness of the colour tones. ”

“ Though suffering from bodily ailments during the greater part of his adult life, he was robust in his thinking and became a bold and sturdy fighter for the cause of intellectual and religious freedom. Watts was one of the gentlest and kindest of men and a friend of the young. His wide intellectual interests enabled him to write textbooks on logic, geography, and astronomy, which were used in the universities of England as well as Harvard and Yale. ”

“ Watt's grandfather, Thomas Watt, was born in 1642, and found his way to Crawford's Dyke, then adjoining, and now part of, Greenock, where he founded a school of mathematics, and taught this branch, and also that of navigation, to the fishermen and seamen of the locality. That he succeeded in this field in so little and poor a community is no small tribute to his powers. He was a man of decided ability and great natural shrewdness, and very soon began to climb, as such men do. The landlord of the district appointed him his Baron Bailie, an office which then had important judicial functions. ”

“ It is a terrible picture of the god to whom many bow the knee—"dedicated to his worshippers." His leaden face shows a consciousness of power, but not happiness arising from power; his dull eyes see nothing, though his mind's eye sees one thing clearly—the money bags on his lap. The two frail creatures of youth and maiden, "types of humanity" as Watts said, are crushed by his heavy limbs, while behind a fire burns continuously, perhaps also within his massive breast. ”

“ Fortune has a lock of hair on her forehead by which alone she may be captured, and as she glides mockingly along, she leads her pursuers across rock, stream, dale, desert, and meadow typical of life. The pursuit of the elusive is a favourite theme with Watts, and is set forth by the picture "Mischief." Here a fine young man is battling for his liberty against an airy spirit representing Folly or Mischief. Humanity bends his neck beneath the enchanter's yoke—a wreath of flowers thrown round his neck—and is led an unwilling captive ”