Watteau Part 2

Michaelangelo lived to be very old. When this "greatest artist" died he left his work unfinished. Raphael died young, but his achievement was prodigious. Watteau's short sad life of illness and discontent produced more than twelve hundred items.

Watteau began his artistic career influenced in technique by the _pet.i.ts toucheurs_, the sympathetic little masters of the Netherlands to whom he was kin (M. de Julienne calls him in his catalogue "_peintre Flamand de L'Academie Royale_"). Soon the big touch of Rubens intrudes and the technique broadens; next t.i.tian obsesses him, and the shadows under the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens as he watches grow warmer to the watcher, and colour begins to glow; Veronese intervenes, and cooler tones are apparent--and these three great masters of breadth and truth, of warmth and temperament, of chill stateliness, combine in the mind's eye of Watteau. The pleasant places in the gardens of the Luxembourg are peopled with ladies and gallants and "little ladies" and "little gallants," and, as he walks and watches, Teniers' subjects flit across his vision, and the forms of Rubens' rosy and ample matrons.

How would t.i.tian have painted yonder dark woman of the warm colour and deep red hair walking down the glade? The leaves on the trees rustle in the summer air. Light flickers on silken frocks, cold reflections on green. Something whispers to his discontent "paint the scene as you see it," draw the lady sitting on the gra.s.s, her back toward you, in the shot silk frock of bronze and green, and the other standing near, tall and elegant, in rose and yellow. What colour is it? "The colour of a sun-browned wood-nymph's thigh." And her hands behind her back. What hands! "Hands must be better painted than heads, being more difficult."

Beyond in the gardens fountains and little children play; tall trees throw shadows on beauty pouting, the indifferent lover tip-toes away, not so indifferent as he would have the pouting one believe. There is movement toward the gates of the Palace Gardens; children run tripping over tiny dogs led by lute string ribbons; soldiers and music.

Watteau finds himself, not wholly perhaps, but the formative period has pa.s.sed. The artist is made; is himself, gives himself. No longer will the cla.s.sicists prevail; no longer will art be cold and eclectic. The youth from Valenciennes will call Paris back to Nature, and through a temperament will show the world familiar things, will let his imagination play, taking his good where he finds it, but resolving it into something that is his own. He will see with his own eyes. He will paint pictures as he pleases.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII.--FeTE CHAMPeTRE

(In the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Bleak Edinburgh is rich in the possession of this picture of dreamy colour. The hour is sunset; the place is where you will, but the t.i.tle, "Fete Champetre," suits the scene of dalliance quite as well as any other name; a similar picture at Dresden is called by M. Mauclair "The Terrace Party." You perceive here the typical Watteau figures, and behind is a landscape that has all the idealistic charm of his rendering of Nature.]

When Watteau, perhaps unknown to himself, resolved to be himself, a new school was born in France, a school whose influence still prevails. 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. If Constable, Turner, and Bonnington influenced the French school they owe allegiance to Watteau, and through him to "the bull in art,"

Rubens, who was master to Van Dyck, the founder of the English school.

Does Gainsborough's lovely "Perdita" in the Wallace Collection owe nothing of its exquisite femininity, sweet melancholy, and woodland background, to Watteau? Constable and Turner were but paying old debts, for the painter of the _Fetes Galantes_ had shown the beauty of landscape and made it something more than a setting for figures. He taught also that Nature is intimate and familiar with accidental beauty of sunlight and twilight, misty horizons, and lovable little things near to us; not swept and garnished and coldly unreal, but a world where human beings may wander happily with Nature on a level with their own eyes; not a world where only t.i.tans and G.o.ds roam through pseudo-cla.s.sical scenes.

In Watteau's pictures poetry and reality dwell in harmony. 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 even his followers have more of life and warmth and beauty than his predecessors, the frigid and attenuated school of Le Brun.

Fragonard is a master and lives; we are rising to a new appreciation of him; and Pater and Lancret do not tire us even if they are "soulless Watteaus." Le Brun and his school are dead, and must one day be buried in the cellars of the Louvre to make way for their betters--the painters inspired by the Flemish Frenchman--Antoine Watteau--who made possible the modern school. From him Constable, Turner, Gainsborough, Corot, Manet and Monet derived. What an achievement for a short life of thirty-seven years!

IV

HIS CRITICS AND ADMIRERS

Most critics of Watteau allow something of his rhythmic sense and beauty of colour to tinge their appreciations. Ordinary statements of facts seem inadequate to express the feeling he evokes, whether the writer be concerned with the "outwardness" of his genius, like the brothers De Goncourt, or the "inwardness" of it, like M. Camille Mauclair.

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 a.n.a.lysis 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.

The source of all the biographies is the memoir of the Comte de Caylus, which was lost from the archives of the Academy, and discovered by the brothers De Goncourt in a second-hand book-shop. While we are grateful for the information De Caylus's memoir contains, we can but smile at the judgment of a friend and admirer on a contemporary so far in advance of his age as Watteau. Solemn De Caylus entirely failed to understand the real man and artist. Apart from the details he gives of Watteau's life, the pa.s.sages which describe his method of work are the most interesting. He informs us that Watteau could never be an heroic or allegorical painter (thank Heaven!), not being trained academically; he also tells us that his reflections on painting were profound, and that his execution was inferior to his ideas; that he had no knowledge of anatomy, having hardly ever drawn from the nude, so that he neither understood it nor was able to express it. De Caylus also calls Watteau "mannered," but admits that he was endowed with charm, and so on, and so on. Watteau's nudes are studied, and, what is more, achieved. Recall any one of them, "The Toilet," "Antiope," "The Judgment of Paris"--they are as doc.u.mentary as his drawings. The values and reflected lights of his nude bodies are academic enough to satisfy a modern student at Julian's, the most carping and exacting of critics.

De Caylus, while deploring Watteau's methods of technique, contributes the interesting information that he preferred to use his paints liquid; that he rubbed his pictures all over with oil and repainted over this surface; also that he was slovenly in his habits, rarely cleaning his palette, and allowing days to pa.s.s without setting it afresh; that his pot of medium was full of dirt and dust and the sediment of used colours, and that he was idle and indolent.

Well, as to Watteau's methods, I prefer to think that the surface of oil while it mellows preserves also. The worst artists are often the most solicitous of their mediums, and the laborious industry of the mediocre painter is often laborious idleness. A man who can leave behind him, after a short life, the quality and quant.i.ty of work bequeathed to the world by Watteau refutes, by that work, accusations of indolence and idleness. Neither can I admit that he was mannered. His manner was different from the clique of painters then in vogue, and it is obvious that he had a manner, but this very manner is his originality. Of course his pictures are "invented," but invented from the acc.u.mulated facts of his own drawings, wrested from life hurriedly, for he had very little time, and yet showing no marks of haste. If, as M. Mauclair says, "There exists in intellectual consumptives a condition of mind which seems to concentrate all those preceptions of supreme delicacy conferred on n.o.ble minds by the presentiment of approaching death," we need not grieve that the lives of such men as Keats, Watteau, and Schubert were short.

"The body's disease caused a mystic exaltation in the soul, whose productions, far from being touched by debility or decadence, are rather the concentration of extreme power and violent emotion." This intelligent and sympathetic critic goes on to say that the very unwholesomeness of body is marked by "unmistakable health of mind,"

which may indeed be a "courageous facing of earthly finality," but is also a fertile field in which great enterprises are undertaken and achieved.

As I have said, according to your temperament you may take Watteau seriously, lightly, joyously or sadly. There is recompense whether you feel that he is the great and profound master M. Mauclair calls him, or whether you range yourself with the De Goncourts, who describe him as "a painter of Utopias, a beautifier, the most amiable and determined of liars, a painter of pictures where the fiddles of Lerida play marches that lead the way to death, where smart La Tulipe struts and swaggers, and Manon flirts between two gun shots, and a host of little love-birds flutter, light-heartedly, into war's stern discipline."

The De Goncourts note that there is in Watteau's work "murmurs of vague and slow harmony behind the laughing words," and that a "musical sadness gently contagious exhales from these _Fetes Galantes_. Like the seduction of Venice, I know not what veiled poetry breathes sweet and low to our charmed senses."

M. Mauclair a.s.serts that no one has ever understood Watteau so well as Verlaine, and that "his exquisite little volume of poems _Fetes Galantes_ is an absolute transposition of the painter's work"; but it is the brilliant appreciation of the De Goncourts that has had the strongest influence on subsequent writers, so admirably do they reveal Watteau, so like the colour of his pictures are the colours of their words, so adequate is their exposition of one side of Watteau's fascination. They claim Watteau as the great poet of the eighteenth century, and then proceed to give in glittering prose a penetrating and persuasive criticism, apostrophising Watteau's art as "a country refreshed by fountains, decorated with marbles and statues, and peopled by naiades, a country lovable and radiant, far from a jealous world, where baskets of flowers swing from bending trees; where fields are full of music, gardens full of roses and tangled vines; a France where the pines of Italy grow, where villages are gay with weddings, coaches, ceremonies and festal attire, and violins and flutes conduct to a _temple Jesuite_ the marriage of Nature and the Opera."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII.--THE MUSIC LESSON

(In the Wallace Collection)

Watteau, seemingly just for joy in the colour, trickles--there is no other word for it--one luscious colour over another, like liquid jewels embedded in gold. The colour fascinates. Is it rose and white? The man's garments are neither rose, nor white, nor yellow, and yet they are all three. The rose of the woman's rosette repeats the carmines of her complexion. The composition is charming.]

"_La Mode de Watteau_--that divine tailor whose artist scissors have fashioned playfully the delight in disorder, the morning _neglige_, and the beautiful ceremonious garments of the afternoon. Fairy scissors dowering the times to come with fashions from the 'Thousand and One Nights.' Beribboned scissors of Watteau, what a delightful realm of coquetry you cut from the bigoted realm of the Maintenon!"

How different in manner and method is Walter Pater's "Imaginary Portrait," called "A Prince of Court Painters: Extracts from an old French Journal." Calmly this subtle a.n.a.lysis begins, which shows a deeper insight into the personality of Watteau than either the brothers De Goncourt, or M. Mauclair, who calls Pater's "Imaginary Portrait" a "whimsical interpretation." I have read many books about the painter of the _Fetes Galantes_, but I always return to Pater's "whimsical portrait," for it gives the very atmosphere of his artistic descent and development, from the age of seventeen to the last year of his life.

Missing no dominant event, misusing no legends, cast in the form of a diary, the narrative is made convincingly real by Pater's sympathetic imagination.

These extracts are from an imaginary old French Journal, kept apparently by an elder sister of Jean Baptiste Pater, Watteau's pupil. This lonely and sensitive lady, who has evidently lost her cloistral heart to the unconcerned painter, is living in Valenciennes, Watteau's birthplace.

The first entry is dated:--

"VALENCIENNES, _September 1701_.

"They have been renovating my father's large workroom.... Among old Watteau's work-people came his son, 'the genius,' my father's G.o.dson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed and a painter born.... And just where the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old _Hotel de Ville_, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window--which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine seem like people in some fairyland.... His father will hear nothing of educating him as a painter."

"_October 1701._

"Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here.... Ah!

such gifts as his, surely, may once in a way make much industry seem worth while.... He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces.... Yes! I could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that, as I can see, he treats himself to the same quality."

So this gentle woman continues to record in her diary, as if musing on the life of one she loved, the salient happenings in Antony Watteau's career. Nothing escapes Walter Pater's sympathy and understanding, so that at the end we come to a perfect appreciation of his reading of Watteau. This essay, in the form of a journal, is a little masterpiece about a "little master." Under August 1705 we find the following:--

"Antony, looking well, in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, and taller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberries out of doors, ranging ourselves according to his judgment (for a hasty sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of those fresh s.p.a.ces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while Jean-Baptiste and my younger sister danced a minuet on the gra.s.s, to the notes of some strolling lutanist, who had found us out. He is visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he discoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the church here."

Under August 1717 she writes: "Methinks Antony Watteau reproduces that gallant world, those patched and powdered ladies and fine cavaliers, so much to its own satisfaction, partly because he despises it; if this be a possible condition of excellent artistic production--he dignifies, by what in him is neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essential insignificance of what he wills to touch in all that, transforming its mere prettiness into grace. It looks certainly very graceful, fresh, animated, 'piquant,' as they love to say--yes! and withal, I repeat, perfectly pure, and may well congratulate itself on the loan of a fallacious grace not its own."

We are shown his restless nostalgia, his progress, success, and journeying to and fro, his broidery of the world he painted, until, as she says of a summer, "a kind of infectious sentiment pa.s.sed upon us, like an efflux from its flowers and flower-like architecture."

"_January 1720._

"Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger than ever--something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible, in his expression--speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the thought of a summing up of his life."

And then the end under date July 1721:--

"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."