Antoine Watteau

French painter

• Born: October 10, 1684
• Birthplace: Valenciennes, France
• Died: July 18, 1721
• Place of death: Nogent-sur-Marne, France

Watteau was one of the finest French painters of the early eighteenth century and was the originator and perhaps the most successful practitioner of the fěte galante, the idealized, romantic representation of love and sexual liaison.

Early Life

Antoine Watteau (ahn-twahn vah-toh) was Flemish by birth, and he was born in Valenciennes, a border town between France and the Netherlands, which had been a Flemish city until 1678. His father may have been a roofer. In any case, Watteau came from a humble family, and there is nothing very certain about his early years. He may have been apprenticed to a local painter, Gérin, and then to a second, undistinguished painter, possibly named Métayer, who did some scene painting for the Paris Opera, and may have brought Watteau to Paris. Watteau was in Paris by 1702, living hand-to-mouth as a copyist of popular Netherlandish genre paintings. His first professional connection was with Claude Gillot, and he may have been apprenticed to him in the period between 1703 and 1707. Gillot had a reputation for painting theatrical subjects, and he probably had some influence on Watteau’s lifelong interest in that subject. For some unknown reason, they parted abruptly, and Watteau joined Claude III Audran, a popular decorative artist with a sensitive minor talent for wall decoration, which had gained for him commissions in the royal residences. Of importance for Watteau, given his basically provincial background, was the fact that Audran was also the curator of Luxembourg Palace, where the great collection of Marie de Médicis’ Rubenses was housed. Peter Paul Rubens was to be an important influence, and the elegant park landscape of the royal palaces was to be an ingratiating element in Watteau’s work.

Watteau was settled into steady employment by the end of the first decade of the century, and he began to take some formal instruction at the Royal Academy. In 1712, his career was given some legitimacy when he was admitted as an associate member of the academy. He was, by this time, in demand as a painter, but he still needed to provide the academy with a specific painting on a specific subject in order to be considered for full membership in the institution that set the stamp of public success on artists at that time. Popular acceptance was one thing; his ascent to full acceptance by his peers was to take somewhat longer.

Life’s Work

The fěte galante was not a sudden inspiration but an original variation on a kind of painting that had had long and enthusiastic popularity in the seventeenth century, particularly in the Netherlands. Genre scenes, often of common peasant life, by painters such as David Teniers (1582-1649), were to have a constant market long into the eighteenth century, and Watteau may have supported himself as a painter of that kind of popular art. Certainly there is an interesting group of paintings of military camp life, painted in his early years, which can be related to that genre in their representation of the modest, day-to-day life of the military and their families as they travel through the countryside. The significant aspect of this choice of theme is its eschewing of the glory of military action in favor of the mundane conduct of a group of people living, in a sense, in the open air. This same interest in the less than glamorous aspects of certain ways of life shows up in his other paintings of the same period, in which he begins to explore the theatrical world. He seems to have had little interest in the bravura aspects of the stage, and considerable sensitivity toward actors and actresses as human beings who happen to be involved in dressing and comporting themselves in a profession that is larger than life.

There is another piece of this puzzle that is somewhat more difficult to put in place. There is a very small group of paintings that suggests that Watteau may have been one of the great erotic painters. Those that are extant suggest an implosion of sexual intensity, a kind of quiet blaze of passion, which quite transcends simple pornographic titillation, and will often show up in the fětes in the flare of a nostril or a kind of glazing of an eye in something of a sexual daze.

What the fětes are, in fact, seems simple when viewed as the finest examples of the French rococo theme of sexual dalliance among the upper classes. Generally, that is what they are in the hands of less-accomplished artists such as Watteau’s pupil, Jean Baptiste Pater (1695-1736). Yet they are not quite so simple when Watteau is the painter. They have a Rubenesque lushness of color wedded to a Venetian influence that used color rather than line for modeling; they have, however, something more, a peculiar blending of sophisticated sexual ideality and underlying reality that reminds the viewer of Watteau’s Flemish provinciality. The combination of lovers dressed in high fashion and characters dressed as players from the Parisian version of the Italian commedia dell’arte, portraying the ambiguities, the arabesques of sexual confrontation, creates an air of fleeting reality that transcends the obviousness of the theme. If they are rococo in shape, in color, in theme, in character, they are also larger than that, ultimately. What Watteau achieves in his fětes galantes is the kind of artistic elevation that Jean-Siméon Chardin would later achieve in his paintings of simple servant life, and which Paul Cézanne would capture in his still lifes: a sense that the work of art has a monumentality, an aesthetic importance that defies definition, and turns the commonplace, the obvious, even the trivial theme into a symbol of the mystery of human and aesthetic endeavor. Watteau—passed by in the normal swift peregrination of the gallery visitor intent on making culture in the least amount of time—looks like any other rococo artist, pretty, but shallow. Watteau concentrated upon a much more formidable matter, a confrontation with artistic densities, symbolic connotations, and disturbing emotional depths.

These characteristics are best displayed in the painting that was to gain for Watteau full membership in the Royal Academy, the Pilgrimage to Cythera. There is much critical quarrel about whether the lovers are on their way to Cythera or on their way back, and whether this painting is better than a later version, but little quarrel over their greatness as paintings and the way in which the simple theme of sexual blandishments seems to say something about the fleeting nature of human desire. Gorgeous, lush, celebratory, magnificently poised in its graceful juxtaposition of elegantly dressed and beautiful people, it is also a painting that seems to carry a foreboding sense of human fragility.

What it might have meant to Watteau is impossible to say, but it is known that he was a man of some reserve, occasionally cantankerous, and given to withdrawing from society. The painting of Cythera for the academy may have been something of a triumph in itself, but the acceptance by the institution may have been diminished by the fact that the usual categories for acceptance lay with history, landscape, or genre subjects. The academy established a special category for Watteau as a painter of the fěte galante. This may have been a compliment to him; some critics suggest that it was not so, but a distinction with a limiting difference, implying that Watteau was not quite up to the demands of the formally established categories. It does distinguish him, however, from other painters of the period, and he was to heighten that difference in his later paintings, in which the idealities of beauty, sexual attraction, and social position were to become even more obviously confronted with the limitations of reality.

The critical acceptance of Watteau as an early example of the Romantic artist (almost one hundred years before this type of artist was to appear formally) was fostered by the Goncourt brothers, the French men of letters of the mid-nineteenth century, who saw in Watteau’s life and in his work a deep elegiac melancholy that was probably not clearly recognized during his lifetime. Certainly there was an enthusiasm for such readings of Watteau in the nineteenth century that led to a revival of his popularity, and certainly the problem of subjective imposition of tone and meaning on the arts is not uncommon, but there may be more to the idea than changing taste.

Watteau was a man dying by inches in the later stages of his career, and he died very young, of tuberculosis, a wasting disease, which may give credence to the idea that he is the bagpipe player looking sadly at the dancers in Venetian Pleasures. In those few later years, that tender melancholy is a constant. Even paintings of the clowns of the Italian comedic world are touched with a sense of vulnerability. Gilles, for example, is a painting of a character in the commedia who is usually mischievous, stupid, and vulgar; Watteau’s Gilles has an air of helplessness about him that is quite unnerving, and which has made the painting one of the best-known works in the history of art. This touch of reality intruding on the thin skin of his idealizations of young love and social pleasures would become stronger in his last works and would fuel the psychological reading of his career. Continually in demand, he spent almost a year in London in 1719, returning to Paris in 1720, where he continued to paint, producing one of his finest works, Gersaint’s Shopsign, with the clear intention that it should be used as simply that, a sign to be mounted (as it was for a short time) outside the shop of his friend and dealer Edme Gersaint. It would seem that Watteau had come full circle. In the last months of his life, he rejected his fame as a painter of romantic idealities to return to the kind of work which he had probably needed to do in order to live in the early years of his career. There seems to have been little pretension in his personality; it is likely that Gilles was also painted for use as a poster advertising a theatrical group. In neither case did the proposed function of the work deter Watteau from painting at his very best.

Increasingly ill, Watteau retired to the outskirts of Paris in his last months, where he painted a Crucifixion for the local parish priest. Like so much of his work, it is missing. He died at the age of thirty-six on July 18, 1721.

Significance

Antoine Watteau was the first, and ultimately the best, of that group of French rococo painters who were to idealize and ultimately trivialize the art of love in eighteenth century painting. Part of the reason lay in the fact that his pupils, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Pater and Nicolas Lancret (possibly a pupil) were less-established artists; part of the reason may have been dangerously implicit in the subject itself, in its potential for excess, for sentimentalization, for emphasizing emotion at the expense of artistic integrity. He seems to have had a more salutary influence on two later painters in the genre, François Boucher, who began his career as an engraver of Watteau, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, although Boucher had a tendency to slip into insipidity, which was never a mark of Watteau’s work.

Indeed, in Watteau’s drawings, which are often as masterful as his best paintings, and in his finer works, there is a sense that he is the artist who leans back to the tradition of the Giorgione dreamworld and forward to the epiphanic stillnesses of Chardin. Technically dubious, sometimes downright sloppy as a painter, he is, nevertheless, an example of that peculiar kind of artist whose aesthetic vision transcends both technique and subject.

Bibliography

Börsch-Supan, Helmut. Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721. Translated by Anthea Bell. Cologne, Germany: Könemann, 2000. Examination of Watteau’s art, describing his style, his influence on other artists, and his ability to understand and represent the historic events of his time.

Brookner, Anita. Watteau. London: Paul Hamlyn, 1967. Short, well illustrated, and the best introductory study of Watteau’s work, written charmingly by an art historian who would later become one of Great Britain’s finest novelists. Her work on eighteenth century French painters of feeling and her deep understanding of the role of the emotions in those painters makes her particularly helpful in dealing with the nuances of Watteau’s work.

Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. 14th ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985. Watteau’s greatness can be missed if he is viewed by himself. What is needed is a historical sense of Watteau: a Flemish artist, naturally inclined to a genre of considerable power in its own right, which he somehow maintains and uses to make something new, and equally valid. This book puts him in perspective within the history of art.

Levey, Michael. Rococo to Revolution. London: Thames and Hudson, 1966. Levey, a former director of the National Gallery in London, argues for viewing Watteau as an anticipation of Romanticism. Well written and well illustrated.

Plax, Julie Anne. Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Plax explores the themes and political issues in Watteau’s paintings, and describes how his artistic technique aimed to subvert “high art.”

Posner, Donald. Antoine Watteau. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. This is an excellent examination of Watteau’s life and career, written by the scholar who finds the “romantic” Watteau somewhat questionable and is prepared to make his interesting case to the contrary. Also very good on possible symbolic reading of Watteau paintings and very helpful on the artist’s early career.

Vidal, Mary. Watteau’s Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992. Vidal maintains that conversation was crucial to Watteau’s images of sociability and was a framework for all of his paintings. She places his work within the context of seventeenth and eighteenth century France, when conversation became an art, women’s salons flourished in Paris, and the written conversation became an accepted literary genre.

Wintermute, Alan. Watteau and His World: French Drawing from 1700 to 1750. New York: American Federation of Arts, and London: Merrell Holberton, 1999. A catalog for an exhibition of drawings by Watteau, his mentors, and artists he influenced. Includes essays, color reproductions, and a bibliography of each drawing.