Watteau in London and Paris

From his first true master Claude Gillot (1673-1722), a painter of scenes from the Commedia dell'Arte, Watteau inherited his love for the Italian Comedy. Although Louis XIV had closed down their theatre in 1697, the actors of the Italian Comedy continued to perform, half-subversively, elsewhere. Harlequin, Columbine, Mezzetin and Pierrot became regular characters in Watteau's pictures, and even joined the assembly at Les Plaisirs du Bal at the Dulwich Gallery; a ball opened by L'Indifferent from the Louvre and his partner.

On leaving Gillot's studio he enrolled as a student at the Academie Royale and earned a pitiful living from decorative hackwork at the Palais de Luxembourg. There he saw and disliked Rubens's set of pictures of The Courtship and Marriage of Henri IVand Marie de'Medici for their ostentatious pomp and inelegance. He preferred the surrounding Luxembourg Gardens to the other royal parks because they were not so trimly arranged; also for their ancient forest-trees, the descendants of which still crotchet and dapple its walks with their summer shadows. Cajoled by the trees in leaf, he set off for Valenciennes, to return, yet not with landscapes but with military scenes.

Watteau became a student at the Academy when already an accomplished master because he wished to compete for the Prix de Rome: four years at the French School of Art in Rome at the expense of the State. The stipulated subject for the prize that year was David (which left plenty of scope to painters of heroical or allegorical works, but not for Watteau). Either because he had not studied the rules for the prize, or considered them merely advisory, or else, averse from commissioned pictures and finding the rules stupid, he submitted two military scenes he chose for himself instead. He never achieved the Prix de Rome but was made an Academician by election, without a preliminary trial in Rome; a higher honour, although Watteau had longed for the sojourn in the ease of a warm climate and the chance to widen the limited range of his pictures.

The honour he was rewarded for his two military scenes brought in many requests for his works which, if he had been a clever bargainer or a quicker worker, would have provided him with enough money to stay in Italy for as long as he liked, as Poussin and Claude did. But he was neither of these, and by then too exhausted to leave Paris and its environs. His dealers were pleased with that. He spent five years over the reception piece required of newly elected Members of the Academy, but in its wistful beauty, which has power to bring tears to the eyes, it was such as the Academy had never received before, nor ever would again: The Embarkation to Cythera now in the Louvre. His ephemeral lovers are en voyage, not to the Isle of Love but to the Elysian Fields, with Cupids as their boatmen over the River Styx. 'When shall we be happy?', they ask. 'There or nowhere', replies Watteau in his weariness.

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