Antoine Watteau

Biography

On 28 August 1717 the clerk of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture recorded in the minutes that the Sieur Antoine Watteau, painter, native of Valenciennes, provisionally admitted on 30 July 1712, had sent in the picture he had been asked to execute for his reception, and that it represented a pilgrimage to the island of Cythera. Then he struck out the last words and wrote in their place: “fête galante”. Thus, for the sake of one painter, the Academy created a genre of its own. At the ceremony were the King’s first painter, Antoine Coypel, Watteau’s old master Claude Gillot, and the Regent, the Duke of Orléans.

Watteau took five years over his reception piece instead of the prescribed two, and more than once he was summoned to explain why he was late.

He was baptised on 10 October 1684 in Valenciennes, a town of the County of Hainaut that had passed to France only a few years before his birth; the family was probably Walloon. His father, Jean-Philippe Watteau, a roofer by inheritance who had risen to contractor, went to law with his neighbours and, by one account, stopped paying for his son’s lessons with the local painter Jacques-Albert Gérin. Between 1700 and 1702 the young man left secretly, against his father’s will and without money, and walked to Paris. There he took work in a workshop on the Pont Notre-Dame that turned out cheap copies of popular pictures by the batch, and repeated the same “Old Woman Reading” by Gerard Dou over and over, giving his free time to drawing from life. Around 1704 he was noticed by the Mariettes, father and son, engravers and print dealers; with them he first saw Rembrandt’s etchings, Titian’s drawings and prints after Rubens, and through them he became a pupil of Claude Gillot, who painted small scenes from the Italian comedy. From these years survive “Harlequin, Emperor of the Moon” in Nantes and the “Satire on Doctors” in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. In 1707 or 1708, after a quarrel with Gillot, he moved to the decorator Claude Audran, keeper of the Luxembourg Palace. The palace then served as a store for pictures and tapestries not thought worthy of Versailles, and Watteau could look as long as he liked at Rubens’s twenty-four canvases of the “Life of Marie de’ Medici” and at Poussin’s landscapes; the avenues and overgrown groves of the Luxembourg garden would later pass into his own pictures. For Audran he composed ornaments and scenes for wall decorations. He never had an academic training, drawing from casts and antiques.

In the summer of 1709 he competed for the Prix de Rome. The five candidates were told to paint the return of David after his victory over Goliath; on 31 August the result was announced: second place, with no right to the journey to Rome. Neither the sketch nor the picture survives. He left Audran and went home to Valenciennes, selling before he left the first of his military pictures, “The Departing Regiment”, to the dealer Pierre Sirois; the second, “The Bivouac”, he painted at home, and it is now in the Pushkin Museum. In this series, I would note, nobody fires or charges: the soldiers march, rest, wait. In Valenciennes he made friends with Antoine de La Roque, an officer recovering from a wound who later became editor of the Mercure de France, and took on as a pupil the fifteen-year-old Jean-Baptiste Pater, the son of a local sculptor. In less than a year he was back in Paris, lodging with Sirois.

In 1712 he applied to the Academy, and the academician Charles de La Fosse, on seeing his work, told him that he underrated his powers and surpassed them all; on 30 July he was provisionally admitted. In 1714 the banker Pierre Crozat, owner of one of the largest collections in Europe (by the end of his life some four hundred paintings and nineteen thousand drawings), installed Watteau in his new Paris mansion, where, in Gersaint’s words, he “fell greedily” on the drawings of the old masters. At thirty-three Watteau was the most fashionable painter in Paris, yet he had almost no aristocratic patrons: his buyers were bankers and dealers. In 1718 he left Crozat; one of the last things painted in the mansion’s large studio was probably “Gilles”, now “Pierrot” in the Louvre: an actor in a white satin smock stands in the middle of the canvas, his arms hanging, his face almost motionless, while behind him four companions make merry.

At the end of 1719 he went to London to the physician Richard Mead, an admirer of his painting; the climate did him no good. In the summer of 1720 he came back very ill and moved in with Edme-François Gersaint, Sirois’s son-in-law, who had just bought the antique shop “Au Grand Monarque” on the Pont Notre-Dame. Watteau himself asked to be allowed to “loosen his fingers” and paint a sign for it. Gersaint recalled that the thing was done in a week, the painter working only in the mornings, and that it was the one picture he was satisfied with. On two canvases in a single frame the shop opens onto the Paris pavement like a stage; on the left servants pack into a crate a portrait of the recently dead Louis XIV, and on the right connoisseurs examine a picture in an oval frame. Of all his paintings it is the only one in which the action is moved from a park into a room.

On 9 February 1721 Rosalba Carriera, who had come to Paris at Crozat’s invitation, called on him to return a visit; it was then, apparently, that she made his portrait in pastel. In the spring he grew worse, in Paris he found it hard to breathe, and the Abbé Haranger, a canon of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, obtained for him an empty house on the edge of Nogent-sur-Marne with a garden running down to the river. Watteau sent for Pater and for a month made him paint under his eye; Pater said later that he had learned all that was best in those weeks. Watteau died on 18 July 1721, aged thirty-six. He left about a thousand drawings and more than two hundred paintings; his friend Jean de Jullienne published etchings after the drawings in 1726 and 1728 and engravings after the paintings in 1735. His nephew Louis-Joseph, “Watteau de Lille”, and his great-nephew François also became painters.