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Watteau in London and Paris

Contemporary Review, Spring, 2008 by Donald Bruce

IT is a tribute to the French painter, Antoine Watteau, that there are more of his works in public collections in London than in Paris: fourteen in London, twelve in Paris. There would be seven fewer in Paris had it not been for the patriotism of Dr Louis La Caze, who endowed the Louvre in 1869 with his collection of paintings from Watteau's time. The nine Watteaus now in the Wallace Collection in London were sold off by their earliest known French owners between 1753 and 1791, under the premonition or the actuality of the French Revolution. After that they were not much esteemed in an age of Napoleonic swagger and a veneration for the ancient Roman Republic. That pleased the fourth Marquess of Hertford and his illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace, who were both bargain-hunters of eighteenth-century art. Wallace was heir to the unentailed portion of the Marquess's estate (which included Hertford House and the art collection now housed there). To the brace of Watteaus bought by the Marquess, Sir Richard added seven more.

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Benignly, the Louvre has now lent the Wallace Collection at Hertford House seven of La Caze's pictures from 14 February to 18 May: one by Watteau himself; a still-life and two household scenes by Chardin, whose gentle domesticity the Hertfords presumably did not relish; a mythology by Boucher; and two figures de fantaisie by Fragonard. The Watteau, an overdoor of Jupiter and Antiope, is atypical of him but not of the academicians of his age, as a mythological picture with a male nude. The lecherous ruler of the skies often descended in disguise to earth to pursue mortal maidens. Here he creeps up in the form of a satyr towards Antiope, princess of Thebes, as she lies moon-bathing in guileless naked slumber. Watteau also used his preliminary sketch of Antiope for the statue on the fountain in Les Champs-Elisees at the Wallace Collection. Watteau's friends often noted that he was never content with his paintings: only, sometimes, with his drawings. He seems occasionally to have assembled copies of his drawings loosely on his canvas. His drawing of Antiope, with her penduline arm, works well on the plinth of a fountain. In Jupiter and Antiope he contrived a small landslip on the edge of which she sleeps, with her arm dangling over it. This could be justified as a symbol of her risky predicament.

He invented the Fete Champetre, a pictorial form which allowed him to disperse preconceived, and possibly already delineated, images of people of fashion over a wide space of parkland. There are statues, fountains, ancient trees and lawns fading into a vague multi-tinted distance. Solicitous and urbanely flirtatious cavaliers attach themselves to congeries of ladies at rest, slackened in silken lassitude. The vertical pleats of their gowns are fretted with the cross-creases and lustre of the wrinkled satin in which they nonchalantly repose on the ground. Often these demoiselles wear loose sack-dresses, lax against smooth skin. Their contours are ambiguous, as a blessing to the more peach-plump among them. Whilst Watteau's women were far from Rubensian in their girth, they were not sylphs, as one notices in his rare nude studies and paintings. Venus, in his Judgement of Paris in the Louvre has a tight but broad crupper. His Diane au Bain, also in the Louvre, has the opulent thighs of Tintoretto's Susannah in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Sometimes, with well-ordered negligence they listen to the music of lutes and guitars, or play them themselves, or dance to their sound in ephemeral felicity, or merely pass the time in listless flirtation. Where have they come from, and where do they go, when 'Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips', bids adieu? Is it Watteau's allegory of youth? In the pictures Watteau would have known, apart from those of mythological subjects, only peasants sit on the grass. Yet here we find the beau monde, scintillating in its satin vestments, stretched out at ease on the turf. Perhaps one finds the answer in the military scenes of Watteu's Flemish antecedent, David Teniers.

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was a native of Valenciennes, a county town which was part of the Habsburg Netherlands until, after years of turmoil in the wars of Louis XIV, it was ceded to France in 1678, six years before Watteau's birth. Under Louis XIV it became a French garrison, with bivouacs of subalterns in training wherever there was enough free space. Sometimes, as well as the customary camp-followers, the soldiers' visiting families spent time with them under canvas or in the open air. Watteau was familiar from his boyhood with such scenes and on his returns to Valenciennes painted at least three of them. One is The Bivouac at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. These may be embryonic forms of the Fetes Galantes, and would account for the bright-faced children in his Gathering in a Park in the Louvre and Les Champs-Elisees in the Wallace Collection.

Like his own L'Indifferent in the Louvre, Watteau cared little for women and still less, except by way of plain friendship, for men. Frail through respiratory illness, inwardly impatient and restless, suppressing outward emotion, he may have had some amourettes among the Columbines and Flaminias and other slyboots of the theatres he frequented as a lover of the Commedia dell'Arte, and among the models he hired. He painted the well-bred ladies of his Fetes Galantes with the chaste tenderness of Fra Angelico. They are as appalled and affronted as one of the Friar's angels would have been, if a suitor should attempt an indecorous advance, which sometimes happens, as in The Gathering in a Park and Les Faux Pas (both in the Louvre) and Les Plaisirs du Bal (Dulwich Gallery), with other examples in Edinburgh and Dresden. Watteau himself, a provincial from Flanders with a Flemish accent, may have been intimidated by haughty Parisiennes. Like the rustic arbiter in his Judgement of Paris, he presents the golden apple to Venus with an abashed face and eyes that dare not rove, although Cupid lifts her shift higher and higher. As if to revenge himself on these intimidating women of fashion, Watteau painted three pictures of a lady receiving an intimate toilette from her maidservant (Kress Collection, New York, and two understandably private collections).

Watteau in London and Paris

Contemporary Review, Spring, 2008 by Donald Bruce

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