Jean-Antoine Watteau

1684 - 1721 • French • Painter • Rococo

"From the moment I received {a painting by Rubens] I have not been able to rest quiet, and my eyes do not tire of returning to the stand where I have placed it as upon an altar." - Jean-Antoine Watteau

Watteau, born in Flanders, went to Paris at the age of 18. His early work was in interior decorating, for which he painted incidental scenes entwined with garlands, vines, and monkeys (see SINGERIE). One of his patrons was a wealthy textile manufacturer, Jean de Julienne, to whom the letter above was written. In the letter Watteau expresses his admiration for RUBENS, whose work greatly influenced him. Rubens's The Garden of Love (1632-34), in which the stages of amorous attraction are represented, is a painting Watteau knew well, and it seems to have been a source of inspiration. So was the commedia dell'arte, the name given to traveling theater companies, of Italian, mid-16th-century origin, who played before both royalty and commoners throughout Europe and became popular in France. Watteau was also interested in fetes galantes, a Rococo period version of the FETE CHAMPETRE so acclaimed during the late RENAISSANCE. These were excursions designed for love and gallantry in the privileged world of artifice that Watteau observed and painted. Best known is Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (there are two versions, 1709 and 1717), in which a parade of elegantly costumed aristocrats make their way to a golden barge while PUTTI cavort overhead (as they do in Rubens's Garden of Love). Cythera is a Greek island and was the center of the cult of Aphrodite. The shimmer of fabric, feathery trees, and iridescent water are all dreamlike. Imaginary, too, is his other masterpiece, Gersaint's Shop-sign (1721), painted for the friend who sold paintings and actually, briefly, used this painting as a sign (it originally had an arched top to fit an area above the shop's front entrance). Gersaint's Shopsign now rivals VELA.ZQUEZ'Ls as Meninas (1656), VERMEER'S Allegory of Painting (c. 1665), and van EYCK's Anzolfini Double Portrait (1434) as an interpretative challenge. Watteau's picture appears to be the inside of a shop (though not Gersaint's), its walls covered with paintings. Among the interesting details is a shop hand packing a portrait of Louis XIV into a wooden crate. This may be in reference to the king's death, in 1715, as well as to the name of the shop, Au Grand Monarque. Watteau himself died of tuberculosis a few months later. Watteau's friend de Julienne compiled ENGRAVINGS of more than 500 paintings, drawings, and decorations in a tribute known as the Recueil Julienne (published 1735). (Also see BOUCHER) It was through this collection that Watteau's work became known and internationally influential.