Watteau Part 1

Watteau.

by C. Lewis Hind.

PROLOGUE

The apparition of Watteau in France in the early eighteenth century may be likened to the apparition of Giotto in Italy in the early fourteenth.

Each was a genius; each broke away from the herd; each gave to the world a new vision; each inspired a school. But there the resemblance ends.

Giotto's art was Christian, Watteau's Pagan; or, in other words, Giotto lived in an age when the aim of art was to teach religion, Watteau--well, his pictures were designed to delight. Giotto sought to remind men of Christianity, to bring them humbly to their knees with representations (marvellously fresh in those days when art was still groping in the Byzantine twilight) of the life of the Founder of Christianity, all its pathos, pity, and promise. Watteau gave joy and exhiliration to a generation temporally dull and morose, chilled by the academical art of the period, and apparently content with it. Watteau appeared: the little world about him looked at his pictures and, what a change! "Paris dressed, posed, picnicked, and conversed a la Watteau."

Poor Watteau! He gave, he gives joy, but he was sad, discontented, distrustful of himself and others. Sometimes Nature makes a great effort and unites genius to the sane mind and the sane body, as in a t.i.tian, a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a Goethe; more often she breathes genius into a fugitive and precarious sh.e.l.l, as in a Keats, a Francis Thompson, a Watteau, and ironically, or perhaps blessedly, gives them the phthisical temperament so that they crowd youth, adolescence, and age into a burst of hectic performances before they depart.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--THE BALL UNDER A COLONNADE

(In the Dulwich Gallery)

This picture has suffered somewhat from time. But how delightful it is still; how gracious and debonair are the two dancing figures; how fascinating the colour in the woman's green striped rose skirt, and in the man's blue b.u.t.terfly dress. There are seventy-three figures in this small canvas 1 ft. 7-3/4 ins. by 2 ft. 1/4 ins.]

In the following pages the life and art of Watteau are considered, also the curious effect of that life and art upon his biographers, also, frightening word! his technique, his marvellous technique, which is a veritable tonic to painters, who know the almost intolerable difficulties of expression.

His life? Why, it could be told in a page. His art? It is all stated in any one of his significant pictures. He belonged to that cla.s.s of unfortunates who are never at rest in this world. Life to him was a wandering to find home. Always beyond the hills, any place where he did not happen to be at the moment, gleamed the spires of the City of Happiness and Contentment, beckoning, waiting, rising against the sky like the towers of New Jerusalem in Taddeo di Bartoli's "Death of the Virgin." He fled from the boredom of his home in Valenciennes, yet he died longing to return.

Watteau revealed his temperament, on the wing as it were, in his masterpiece "The Embarkment for Cythera." These ethereal and b.u.t.terfly pilgrims of love should be happy enough in their enchanted garden on the border of the azure sea, but no! they are preparing lackadaisically to depart, to be wafted in the ship with the rose-coloured sail to the Island of Cythera, the abode of Venus, whom they worship for the joy of worship, without any desire of possession. On those lovely sh.o.r.es they will find no continuing city. Watteau knows that. Oh! but he was a cynic was this Watteau whose palette was a rainbow, and whose vision was like the flash of a kingfisher's wing in sunlight. Do you remember his "Fete Champetre" at Dresden, with the little exquisite figure of a woman seated on the ground turning away from the spectator? Oh, her bright hair, and the dress--I am a man; but what a dress! What skill and knowledge in the drawing and painting of it! This little lady is essentially Watteau, who loved pretty clothes and budding figures, and whose drawing was as dainty as the frocks he composed; yet I do not think she is the real Watteau. Cast your eye to the left of the picture where stands an elderly, disdainful dandy. You meet this looker-on again and again in Watteau's pictures; he is in the Fete Champetre and yet not of it; he knows how little all this affectation of gaiety really signifies; how transient is this commerce with joy, and yet he lingers there because in Watteau's world there is naught else to do. Yet he himself was always doing--a great worker. He knew, like Zola, that work is the anodyne for the "malady of the infinite" or of self, whichever you like to call it; but he had no wish to teach. He used his art to escape from the world to a dream-realm, where the sun always shines and where Monday morning never comes.

What was he like, this "exquisite little master," restless, changeable, obstinate, irritable, and misanthropic, whose influence on art has been so great? In his portrait of himself engraved by Boucher, the slight, nervous figure, alert, on the point of a petulant outbreak, looks a genius, but a man "gey ill to live with." I have a keener if a sadder vision of him in a portrait drawn by himself, "frightfully thin, almost deathlike." It is called "Watteau Laughing." Frightfully thin, almost deathlike, himself drawn by himself--laughing. That is Watteau.

I

HIS LIFE

It should be an easy task to state the salient facts in the life of a world-renowned painter who lived but thirty-seven years, and who died in 1721; but until the discovery by the brothers De Goncourt, in a second-hand book-shop, of the life of Watteau, written by his friend the Comte de Caylus and read by him before the French Academy in 1748, our knowledge had to be gleaned mainly from the notes to catalogues of his collected works.

The little Flemish town of Valenciennes was ceded to France in 1677--seven years before a son was born to Jean Philippe Watteau and his wife Mich.e.l.le Lardenoise. This son was baptized on the 10th of October 1684 and given the names of Jean Antoine. Jean Philippe, his father, was a tiler, desirous no doubt that his son should succeed him in his own sensible occupation; but discovering Jean Antoine's predilection for covering everything he could find with drawings, grotesque and otherwise, of the strolling players and mountebanks that pa.s.sed through the little town, he submitted to fate and placed him with the official painter of the munic.i.p.ality, named Gerin. Under him Watteau painted "La Vraie Gaiete," his first important attempt at a picture. This was followed by "Le Retour de Guingette," and then his master died. The year was 1701, the age of Watteau seventeen.

It may be said that with Gerin's death Watteau's boyhood died. His father, seeing little return for his expenditure, refused to continue to pay for instruction. Life at home became unbearable to the sensitive youth to whom his calling was as the call of the sea to the sailor-born.

If there was so much of interest in Valenciennes for a painter, what might not the capital offer of spectacular delights? So one morning Antoine left home and walked to Paris, where he found work with Metayer, a scene-painter; but Metayer's patronage soon ceased, and Watteau found himself alone in Paris. Now began his period of penury and the making of the master; also probably, through hunger and cold, the engendering of the disease, consumption, which was to force his genius to its rapid development and from which he was to die. Paris, the marvellous Paris of his dreams, was beautiful, but without heart. Watteau strolled by her river's bank, crept for shelter into the great church of Notre-Dame, wandered out again, and at last found work of a kind that would at least keep him from starvation.

On the Pont Notre-Dame there were shops, exposing daubs, painted by the dozen, for sale. Necessity compelled and Watteau sought and obtained employment at one of these picture manufactories. He proved himself a facile workman, and soon his task became so easy that he could paint from memory the head of St. Nicolas, which it was his duty to repeat over and over again. The other journeymen artists painted skies, draperies, heads, hands, saints, angels, to each a set task, and the payment was proportionate to their skill. Watteau's remuneration for the week's work amounted to three livres--a little more than three francs--and a daily bowl of soup! A less determined youth than this weakling might have succ.u.mbed or renounced his ambitions, but Watteau worked and waited patiently until he could extricate himself from these uncongenial surroundings.

The future painter of dainty and luxurious visions of wealth and breeding was ambitious, if miserable.

He forgot to be hungry, because his hours of leisure from the tyranny of the picture manufactory were filled with the joy of drawing incessantly everything that pa.s.sed before his eyes, from the turn of a head to the flutter of a tempestuous petticoat. A bowl of soup for dinner is an excellent aid to work, and this period no doubt intensified Watteau's love of work and of Nature. The lifeless things he had to copy at the manufactory sent him into the realms of the real, and his great gift of "seeing" was storing up for him innumerable observations which were to be the structure of his future fancies.

One lucky day Watteau met Claude Gillot, the decorative painter, who on seeing his drawings invited him to live in his house and become his pupil and a.s.sistant. So ended his period of absolute want; henceforward Watteau began to find himself, even as disease had already found and marked him.

Claude Gillot's influence upon the formation of Watteau's taste and talent must not be underrated. He was a man of much ability, quite unlike the cold and formal painters of his time. His was a gay art: the mythology of lovers and nymphs, and the light life of the Italian Comedy--Pantaloon, Columbine, and Pierrot--"strange motley--coloured family, clothed in sunshine and silken striped." 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; a capable craftsman, he gave freely, but the jealous side of his nature soon recognised in his intuitive pupil not only an adaptation of his own methods, but also an improvement upon them. In Watteau, no doubt, he saw his own faults, but he also saw his own virtues made finer and rarer. Whatever the reason, over-much similarity of temperament, professional jealousy, or irritability on Gillot's side; ingrat.i.tude, sensitiveness, fickleness, or a sense of superiority on Watteau's, this mutually helpful friendship of five years ended abruptly. We may never know the cause of the quarrel, but we do know that Watteau, although he always warmly praised Gillot's work and admitted his personal indebtedness, refused to be questioned in regard to their disagreement, and was silent about it even to his most intimate friends. Curious to relate, Gillot ceased to paint when Watteau left him, and became an etcher and engraver. Watteau certainly dated the knowledge of his own talent from his a.s.sociation with Gillot, his first real master.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--L'INDIFFeRENT

(In the Louvre, Paris)

Through Watteau's dream-world trips "L'Indifferent," rainbow-hued, mercurial, his indifference a.s.sumed, not troubling to conceal the sad thoughtfulness that lurks in his expression. Who can describe Watteau's colour or his fashion of trickling on the paint? The technique of "L'Indifferent" is marvellous.]

Claude Audran, to whom he went in 1708 at the age of twenty-four (taking his friends Pater and Lancret with him), was keeper or rather doorkeeper of the Luxembourg Palace, and a painter of the ornamental decorations then in vogue. Garlands and arabesques were his speciality. He taught his system of decoration to Watteau, who, sensitive to every artistic sensation, gleaned perhaps from Audran the sense of rhythmic line and made it one of his own chief characteristics.

Living in the Luxembourg Palace he had access to the pictures; he studied them, especially the works of Rubens. Restlessly he would roam the gardens of the Palace, enchanted and inspired by the figures wandering down the paths and grouping themselves under the great trees.

Watteau, dallying in the gardens, remembering the theatrical methods of Metayer, the subjects of Gillot, the flexibility and fancy of Audran, the daring of the great Rubens, began to develop into an original.

Gradually, too, he grew restless, feeling that he was not wholly free to paint his dreams. A vague nostalgia persuaded his artistic temperament that it was his home he wanted to see--Valenciennes and his people. Be that as it may, this was the reason he gave for leaving Audran, who had always been kind and appreciative; although the wily painter of garlands and arabesques tried to dissuade his _protege_ from painting pictures, fearing to lose so able an a.s.sistant in his own ornamental work. Before parting from Audran, Watteau made his first real essay in his second manner, a picture of "The Departure of the Troops," a reminiscence of the life at Valenciennes. This work he sold to the dealer Sirois for sixty livres, and with the money he started for home, despite Audran's protests.

Valenciennes at that time was gay with soldiers and _dames galantes_ and Watteau painted several military pictures--groups marked with truth, yet full of grace; he also filled his sketch-books with incomparable drawings. But he could not long resist the call of Paris. Valenciennes seemed to have grown smaller, less interesting. The painter fretted in the narrow sphere of the provincial town; once again his wayward feet were set towards the capital. He arrived in Paris in 1709, and before long persuaded himself that he would like to visit Rome. With this end in view he competed for the _Prix de Rome_, but succeeded only in obtaining second prize. Soon recovering from the disappointment, he painted a companion picture to the work he had sold to Sirois for sixty livres, but for the companion he asked and obtained two hundred and sixty livres. These two pictures he borrowed from Sirois and hung in a room, where he knew they would be seen by the Academicians as they pa.s.sed from one apartment to another. The painter De la Fosse, impressed by their colour and quality, paused and asked the name of the author.

He was informed that they were the work of a young and unknown man who craved intercession with the king for a "pension" in order that he might study in Italy. De la Fosse sent for Watteau, whom he found modest, shy, and deprecatory of his work. Watteau stated his desire to study abroad.

He was told--the episode in these days seems hardly credible--to his astonishment and joy, that there was no need for him to study with any one; that he was already master; that he would honour the Academy if he would consent to become a member, and that he had only to present himself to be enrolled. This he did and was duly elected, the inauguration fee in consideration of his circ.u.mstances being reduced to one hundred livres. And so in 1712, at the age of twenty-eight, the poor unknown, who failed to win the first prize in the _Prix de Rome_, was made free of the Academy, was given the new t.i.tle of _peintre des Fetes Galantes_, and became, almost in a bound, famous.

Ill and moody, he worked incessantly at his drawings and the pictures which were making it possible for him eventually to produce his masterpiece, "The Embarkment for Cythera." Always dissatisfied with his work, he did not ratify his election to the Academy by sending in his diploma picture until 1717. The patience of the Academy being exhausted, he was reminded of the rule that each newly elected member must present a picture. In a brilliant dash he finished "The Embarkment for Cythera,"

which was accepted on August 28, 1717, as his _piece de reception_.

No longer was there poverty to contend with. Success followed success.

The Academy had set its seal upon him. Everybody wanted Watteaus. In 1716, the year before he sent in his _piece de reception_, he had gone to live with M. de Crozat, whose beautiful house in the Rue Richelieu and his country mansion at Montmorency were filled with works of the old masters, drawings and paintings. We are told that Crozat possessed four hundred pictures of the Venetian and Flemish schools, thousands of drawings, of which two hundred and twenty-nine were by Rubens, one hundred and twenty-nine by Van Dyck, one hundred and six by Veronese, and one hundred and thirteen by t.i.tian. In these luxurious houses of his admiring friend and patron, Watteau might have lived with delight and profit. The park of the country house at Montmorency became the background which inspired his Pastorals, the perfection of his art; this perfection the study of the old masters aided somewhat, no doubt, but Watteau was now master himself, and in knowing them confronted his peers. Here too, for the first time, he met his models as an equal--untrammelled. This man of "medium height and insignificant appearance," whose eyes showed "neither talent nor liveliness," was on familiar and friendly terms with the company gathered at M. de Crozat's house--ladies of fashion, from whom in old days he tried to steal for his note-book a line of neck, a turn of wrist, furtively and hastily, asked nothing better than to be party to his pictures in gardens gay with mondaines, male and female. He observed and painted. We can almost hear the frou-frou of their garments in his pictures.

M. de Julienne, another patron, was full of enthusiasm and eager to possess his works; it was for him that Watteau painted the replica, carried farther and more finished, of the "Embarkment for Cythera,"

which is now at Potsdam. All the world smiled upon Watteau, but the world's favours only made the more capricious and melancholy this incurable brooder over the unattainable. Loving no woman as he loved his art, he longed for tenderness, yet was afraid of it. Cold, shy, fastidious, reserved, ill, he shunned society now that it sought him, and drugged himself with work as a refuge from ennui and from nostalgia for no earthly country.

He left M. de Crozat's house, independence being more vital to him than luxury, and found a companion in Nicolas Vleughels, whom he had met at M. de Julienne's. The two lived together until 1718. Once more the desire for solitude a.s.sailed him. M. de Julienne, who seems always to have been his devoted friend, admonished the ailing painter and begged him to be more careful about his material welfare, as indeed all his other friends did, to whom he retorted, "At the worst there is the hospital; no one is refused there!" His friends advised him to travel.

Of all places he chose London, and arrived on these sh.o.r.es in 1719, finding lodgings at Greenwich.

In London his physician, Dr. Mead, presented him to the king, for whom he painted four pictures, which are now at Buckingham Palace. His health showed no improvement, and the English climate aggravated his illness.

In a letter to Gersaint he wrote of "_Le mauvais air qui regne a Londres a cause de la vapeur du charbon de terre dont on fait usage_."

Dr. Mead, aware no doubt that his condition was hopeless, advised him to return to Paris. This he did, and settled in the house of Gersaint, son-in-law to Sirois, for whom he painted the delightful picture called "Gersaint's Sign,"--"just to limber up his fingers," as he expressed it.

Restlessness again seized him. He believed that he would recover in the country. His friend the Abbe Haranger asked M. le Fevre to find him accommodation in a house at Nogent, and thither he went in 1721.

But the end was near, and Watteau, realising it, proceeded to set his house in order and to make amends for his shortcomings of friendship and of temper, the importance of which the dying man magnified. He sent for his townsman and pupil, Pater, asked forgiveness for having in the past r.e.t.a.r.ded his advancement through fear of rivalry, and made ample amends by giving Pater daily instruction and revealing to him his intimate knowledge of his craft. Pater said, after Watteau's death, that this was "the only fruitful teaching he had ever received." His townsman no doubt brought back to the dying painter thoughts of home. Ever hopeful, like all consumptives, he was sure that a change of air would cure him!

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE IV.--THE EMBARKMENT FOR CYTHERA

(In the Louvre, Paris)

In 1717 Watteau finished, after a long delay, his _piece de reception_ for the Academy, the famous first study for "The Embarkment for Cythera." This picture was painted in seven days, and elaborated, but hardly improved, in the Potsdam version. Behold these ethereal and b.u.t.terfly pilgrims of love preparing lackadaisically to be wafted in the ship with the rose-coloured sail to the abode of Venus. On those lovely sh.o.r.es they will find no continuing city. Watteau knows that.]

He instructed Gersaint to sell everything, and to make preparations for the journey home. He made the journey home, but not to Valenciennes. He died suddenly in Gersaint's arms on July 18, 1721.