French eighteenth-century genre painting

Apollo, Sept, 2003 by Humphrey Wine

8 Watteau, Peaceful love (Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin). Perhaps this entry, like some of the others written by German scholars, has suffered in translation. The assertion that none of the figures is wearing exotic costume is questionable, and the notion that they all look into the landscape is evidently wrong.

(9) Watteau, Venetian pleasures (National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). The painting includes Watteau's self portrait as a musette player at the right, and at the left his friend Vleughels strutting before a beautiful female dancer. If, as Wintermute sensibly suggests, the picture represents a private joke, the key to it may lie with the male figure in the background who gestures towards an immodestly posed female nude statue. One may hypothesise that the female dancer at the centre was known to Watteau (was she one of his models?) and that he--the music maker in the picture--had facilitated some liaison between her and Vleughels.

11 Watteau, Iris (The dance) (Gemaldegalerie, Berlin). A group of children at the right of a picture by Philip Mercier at Wilton House is taken from the left hand group in Watteau's painting) The Mercier may well have been in England by 1724-25, (6) which might seem to confirm that Watteau's picture had indeed been painted there in 1719-20, as has been assumed on the basis that the girl's costume was fashionable in England in 1718. However, 'Iris' could be a French girl in English costume, or an English girl in Paris, which would result in a different date for Watteau's painting. Mercier's picture does hot help greatly in this connection since it probably derived from a print in reverse after the Watteau which C.-N. Cochin made in Paris in the period 1719-26.

25 Jean-Francois de Troy, The reading from Moliere. Regrettably the loan has been withdrawn at the last moment from its intended exhibition in Washington.

30-42 Both in the exhibition and the catalogue, the organisers call Chardin 'Jean Baptiste Simeon'. Although he was often referred to thus during his lifetime and into the twentieth century, (7) he was baptised 'Jean-Simeon', (8) and since the major monographic show devoted to him in 1979 the correct nomenclature has generally been adopted. (9)

30 Chardin, The game of billiards. This work was on the London art market in 1962 attributed to Jean Francois de Troy.

37,42 Chardin, The kitchen maid and The attentive nurse. The suggestion that The attentive nurse was painted as a companion piece for The kitchen maid seems unlikely on compositional grounds, A pairing with Return from the market (no. 38) is more probable, since--as the catalogue entry acknowledges--both pictures feature a full-length standing woman, and because of the relationship in each case between the woman, the food and the flat surface of the furniture on which it is placed. In addition a sketch of The attentive nurse, probably a premiere pensee, includes a jug in the bottom left hand corner, a detail which would 'answer' the bottles in the bottom right-hand corner of The return from the market. It is what one might expect of an artist experimenting with the composition of a companion picture.