Difference between revisions of "Antoine Watteau" - New World Encyclopedia
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[[Image:Rosalba Carriera Portrait Antoine Watteau.jpg|thumb|200px|left|Watteau in the last year of his life, by [[Rosalba Carriera]], 1721]] | [[Image:Rosalba Carriera Portrait Antoine Watteau.jpg|thumb|200px|left|Watteau in the last year of his life, by [[Rosalba Carriera]], 1721]] | ||
| − | '''Jean-Antoine Watteau''' ([[October 10]], [[1684]] – [[July 18]], [[1721]]) was a [[France|French]] [[painter]] whose work and legacy has left it's mark on the world of art. His career, though brief, helped to create a revival in color and movement at a time when sedentary poses and mute colors were rampant. His paintings were influenced by the likes of [[Correggio]] and [[Peter Paul Rubens|Rubens]]. His work is also known for playing a part in the revitalized style first referred to as [[Baroque]] and later as [[Rococo]]. He is often credited with being the first major Rococo artist [http://www.encyclopediaproject.net/wiki/Rococo#Painting]. The Rococo movement was stylized by the use of delicate colors and curving forms. Many of the painters of the time, including Watteau, decorated their canvases with myths of love, graceful cherubs, and whimsical settings. Watteau also invented a specific genre of painting know as the ''[[fête galante|fêtes galantes]]''. This genre was known for its portrayal of idyllic rural life, a sense of theatrics, and pastoral charm. Watteau found inspiration for his paintings in the world of [[Italy|Italian]] [[comedy]] and [[ballet]]. He is known to have greatly influenced the great painters[[Jean Honore Fragonard]] and [[Francois Boucher]] [http://www.encyclopediaproject.net/wiki/Rococo#Painting]. | + | '''Jean-Antoine Watteau''' ([[October 10]], [[1684]] – [[July 18]], [[1721]]) was a [[France|French]] [[painter]] whose work and legacy has left it's mark on the world of art. His career, though brief, helped to create a revival in color and movement at a time when sedentary poses and mute colors were rampant. His paintings were influenced by the likes of [[Correggio]] and [[Peter Paul Rubens|Rubens]]. His work is also known for playing a part in the revitalized style first referred to as [[Baroque]] and later as [[Rococo]]. He is often credited with being the first major Rococo artist [http://www.encyclopediaproject.net/wiki/Rococo#Painting]. The Rococo movement was stylized by the use of delicate colors and curving forms. Many of the painters of the time, including Watteau, decorated their canvases with myths of love, graceful cherubs, and whimsical settings. Watteau also invented a specific genre of painting know as the ''[[fête galante|fêtes galantes]]''. This genre was known for its portrayal of idyllic rural life, a sense of theatrics, and pastoral charm. Watteau found inspiration for his paintings in the world of [[Italy|Italian]] [[comedy]] and [[ballet]]. He is known to have greatly influenced the great painters [[Jean-Honore Fragonard]] and [[Francois Boucher]] [http://www.encyclopediaproject.net/wiki/Rococo#Painting]. |
==Early life and training== | ==Early life and training== | ||
Revision as of 01:57, 26 November 2007
Jean-Antoine Watteau (October 10, 1684 – July 18, 1721) was a French painter whose work and legacy has left it's mark on the world of art. His career, though brief, helped to create a revival in color and movement at a time when sedentary poses and mute colors were rampant. His paintings were influenced by the likes of Correggio and Rubens. His work is also known for playing a part in the revitalized style first referred to as Baroque and later as Rococo. He is often credited with being the first major Rococo artist [1]. The Rococo movement was stylized by the use of delicate colors and curving forms. Many of the painters of the time, including Watteau, decorated their canvases with myths of love, graceful cherubs, and whimsical settings. Watteau also invented a specific genre of painting know as the fêtes galantes. This genre was known for its portrayal of idyllic rural life, a sense of theatrics, and pastoral charm. Watteau found inspiration for his paintings in the world of Italian comedy and ballet. He is known to have greatly influenced the great painters Jean-Honore Fragonard and Francois Boucher [2].
Early life and training
Not much is known about the birth and childhood of Jean-Antoine Watteau. It is known that he was born in the Flemish town of Valenciennes. Valenciennes was unique at the time because it had recently been annexed by the kind of France, Louis XIV. The Watteau family was of Flemish descent.
Watteau grew up in a home where his father, a master tiler, was often prone to drinking and brawling [3]. At a very early age, Watteau showed an interest and a definite gift for painting. He began painting the local people of Valenciennes, including the shop-keepers, the traveling performers, and the various tradesmen [4]. Realizing the talent, Watteau was soon apprenticed to Jacques-Albert Gérin, a local painter. However, Watteau's extraordinary talent soon surpassed that of his teacher and, like most young painters of his time, he made his way to Paris in 1702.
Once in Paris, Watteau found employment at a workshop on Pont Notre-Dame. His work was tasking, he was commissioned to make copies of popular genre paintings in the Flemish and Dutch tradition. Although a repetitive job, the daily tasks served to help Watteau develop many aspects to his talent, including his development of his characteristic sketchlike technique. This second rate painting occupation was not to last for long. Soon, Watteau's world changed when he met the painter Claude Gillot.
Watteau met Gillot in 1703 and was hired as his assistant immediately thereafter. Gillot was a pioneer of art, as well as a bit of rebellion. Gillot openly painted against the approved genre of official art commissioned under Louis XIV's reign. It was in Gillot's studio that Watteau was introduced to what would become a lifelong passion. The commedia dell'arte was a subject often painted by Gillot, even though its actors were expelled from France several years earlier). It was during this time that Watteau began painting this subject matter as well.
Watteau soon moved to the workshop of Claude Audran III, an interior decorator. It was through acquaintance and admiration of Audran, that Watteau began to pay particular attention to the elegance epitomized in his drawings. With Audran's help, Watteau was able to see the magnificent paintings by Peter Paul Rubens that were housed in the Palais du Luxembourg. Audran served as curator of the Palais, and was instrumental in obtaining Watteau entrance so that he could admire Ruben's canvases painted for Queen Marie de Medici.
Watteau was so impressed by the work of Rubens in particular, and with various Venetian masters in general, that he spent endless hours in studying. These artists inspired him to implement even more elegance and movement into his creations. Watteau was finding his own style, creating paintings that were inspired by Rubens, but were still uniquely his own. Watteau also found endless inspiration from the collection of his patron and friend, the banker Pierre Crozat.
Mature works
In 1709 Watteau tried to obtain the Prix de Rome and was rejected by the Academy. In 1712 he tried again and was considered so good that, rather than receiving the one-year stay in Rome for which he had applied, he was accepted as a full member of the Academy. He took five years to deliver the required "reception piece," but it was one of his masterpieces: the Pilgrimage to Cythera, also called the Embarkation for Cythera.
Interestingly, while Watteau's paintings seem to epitomize the aristocratic elegance of the Régence (though he actually lived most of his short life under the oppressive climate of Louis XIV's later reign), he never had aristocratic patrons. His buyers were bourgeois such as bankers and dealers.
Although his mature paintings seem to be so many depictions of frivolous fêtes galantes, they in fact display a sober melancholy, a sense of the ultimate futility of life, that makes him, among 18th century painters, one of the closest to modern sensibilities. His many imitators, such as Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Baptiste Pater, borrowed his themes but could not capture his spirit.
Among his most famous paintings, beside the two versions of the Pilgrimage to Cythera (one in the Louvre, the other in the Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin), are Pierrot (long identified as "Gilles"), Fêtes venitiennes, Love in the Italian Theater, Love in the French Theater, "Voulez-vous triompher des belles?" and Mezzetin. The subject of his hallmark painting, Pierrot or Gilles, with his slowly fading smile, seems a confused actor who appears to have forgotten his lines; he has materialized into the fearful reality of existence, sporting as his only armor the pathetic clown costume. The painting may be read as Watteau's wry comment on his mortal illness.
Watteau's final masterpiece, the Shop-sign of Gersaint[5], exits the pastoral forest locale for a mundane urban set of encounters. Painted at Watteau's own insistence, "to take the chill off his fingers", this sign for an art shop in Paris is effectively the final curtain of Watteau's theatre. It has been described as Watteau's Las Meninas, in that the theme appears to be the promotion of art. The scene is an art gallery where the façade has magically vanished. The gallery and street in the canvas are fused into one contiguous drama.
Watteau alarmed his friends by a carelessness about his future and financial security, as if foreseeing he would not live for long. In fact he had been sickly and physically fragile since childhood. In 1720, he traveled to London,England to consult Dr. Richard Mead, one of the most fashionable physicians of his time and a fan of Watteau's work. However London's damp and smokey air offset any benefits of Dr. Mead's wholesome food and medicines. Watteau returned to France and spent his last few months on the estate of his patron, Abbe Haranger where he died in 1721 perhaps from tuberculous laryngitis at the age of 37. The Abbe said Watteau was semi conscious and mute during his final days, clutching a paint brush and painting imaginary paintings in the air.
Critical assessment and legacy
Little known during his lifetime beyond a small circle of his devotees, Watteau "was mentioned but seldom in contemporary art criticism and then usually reprovingly".[1] Sir Michael Levey once noted that Watteau "created, unwittingly, the concept of the individualistic artist loyal to himself, and himself alone". If his immediate followers (Lancret and Pater) would depict the unabashed frillery of aristocratic romantic pursuits, Watteau in a few masterpieces anticipates an art about art, the world of art as seen through the eyes of an artist. In contrast to the Rococo whimsicality and licentiousness cultivated by Boucher and Fragonard in the later part of Louis XV's reign, Watteau's theatrical panache is usually tinged with a note of sympathy, wistfulness, and sadness at the transience of love and other earthly delights.
Watteau's influence on the arts (not only painting, but the decorative arts, costume, film, poetry, music) was more extensive than that of almost any other 18th-century artist. According to the 1911 Britannica, "in his treatment of the landscape background and of the atmospheric surroundings of the figures can be found the germs of Impressionism". The Watteau dress, a long, sacklike dress with loose pleats hanging from the shoulder at the back, similar to those worn by many of the women in his paintings, is named after him. A revived vogue for Watteau began in Europe during the Victorian era and was later encapsulated by the Goncourt brothers and the World of Art. In 1984 Watteau societies were created in Paris and London. Since 2000 a Watteau centre has been established at Valenciennes.
La Partie carrée.
Das Ballvergnügen (Les Plaisirs du bal) (1717).
Der Tanz (1710-1720).
Der Jäger des Nestes (1710).
Die Familie des Mezzetin (1717).
Die französische Komödie (1718).
Die Skulptur, Tondo (1710).
Les Charmes de la vie (1718)
Jupiter und Antiope (1715).
Venezianische Feste (1717).
Mezzetin (1717-1719).
Maskerade (1717).
Notes
- ↑ Arnold Hauser. Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism. Routledge (UK), 1999. P. 21.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Dormandy, Thomas. "The white death: the history of tuberculosis". New York University Press, 2000. p.11.
- Levey, Michael, Rococo to Revolution. Thames and Hudson, 1966.
- Roland Michel, Marianne, Watteau. Flammarion, 1984.
- Schneider, Pierre, The World of Watteau. Time-Life Books, 1967.
External links
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