Part 2
But the end was near, and Watteau, realising it, proceeded to set his house in order and to make amends for his shortcomings of friendship and of temper, the importance of which the dying man magnified. He sent for his townsman and pupil, Pater, asked forgiveness for having in the past retarded his advancement through fear of rivalry, and made ample amends by giving Pater daily instruction and revealing to him his intimate knowledge of his craft. Pater said, after Watteau's death, that this was "the only fruitful teaching he had ever received." His townsman no doubt brought back to the dying painter thoughts of home. Ever hopeful, like all consumptives, he was sure that a change of air would cure him!
He instructed Gersaint to sell everything, and to make preparations for the journey home. He made the journey home, but not to Valenciennes. He died suddenly in Gersaint's arms on July 18, 1721.
He was artist to the end. "Take away that crucifix," he said to the priest; "it pains me. How could an artist dare to treat my Master so shockingly." It is said that one of the last remarks of this sensitive, ill-balanced, disease-stricken man of genius was to beg the Abbé Haranger to forgive him for having used his face and figure for his picture of "Gilles."
So at the age of thirty-seven he escaped finally from reality--that reality which his art had always avoided so delightfully and so convincingly.
II
HIS ART
Watteau's art appeals to everybody, and fascinates all who study it attentively. The lovely decorative pictures tell their own story; and for those who require more than a story in a picture, there is his craftsmanship, his originality, his personality; the delight of comparing one alluring achievement with another, and the interest in noting the inferiority of his followers--Lancret, Pater, and the rest--who annexed his manner but who could not annex the flame of his genius. Visit the Dulwich Gallery, study and enjoy Watteau's "Ball under a Colonnade," then go to Hertford House and examine Pater's copy of Watteau's "Ball." The fire of genius and glory of colour are gone. It is as stolid as Paul Potter's "Bull."
I have an especial affection for "The Ball under a Colonnade" at Dulwich; for until the regal gift of Hertford House to the nation, with its nine Watteaus, this little "Ball under a Colonnade," and in a lesser degree its companion picture at Dulwich, a "Fête Champêtre," were my first wanderings in the lyric land of Watteau. The National Gallery which, before the present Director came into office, treated the French school with an indifference that almost amounted to disdain, does not possess a single Watteau. Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Cambridge own examples of varying merit, and there is one in that treasure-house of rare and strange things, Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It is probable that the nation possesses yet another example. "A Watteau in the Jones' Collection" was the surprising heading of an article in a recent number of the _Burlington Magazine_ by Mr. Claude Phillips, who claims that the little Watteau-like picture called "The Swing" in the Jones' Collection at South Kensington is a veritable Watteau.
Germany is rich in Watteaus, with ten at Potsdam and five in Berlin. France, which should be the richest, is poorer in number and importance than either Germany or England, although there are ten examples in the Louvre, including the original "Embarkment for Cythera," "L'Indifférent," and "Jupiter and Antiope."
Let us return for a moment to "The Ball under a Colonnade" at Dulwich, which from its own inherent charm and from its position in that quiet and reposeful gallery may fitly serve as an introduction to the art of Watteau. Take a chair--they permit it at Dulwich--and seat yourself before it. The picture has suffered, alas! somewhat from Time, which has almost obliterated the fairy-like fountain. But how charming the picture is still; how gracious and debonair are the two dancing figures; how fascinating the broken colour in the woman's green-striped, rose skirt and in the man's blue butterfly dress. There are seventy-three figures in the small canvas, 1 ft. 7-3/4 in. by 2 ft. 1/4 in. You can almost hear the musicians playing, the fall of water from the fading fountain, the rustle of leaves, and the ripple of laughter. Think of the painters, dead and gone, who have loved this "Ball under a Colonnade." Constable was one of them. He was not afraid to praise a picture when he liked it. Listen to this--Constable's criticism of a copy that Leslie had made of Watteau's "Ball." He asked Constable what he thought of the copy, and the great man answered:--
"Your copy looks colder than the original, which seems as if painted in honey--so mellow, so tender, so soft, and so delicious; so I trust yours will be; but be satisfied if you but touch the hem of his garment, for this inscrutable and exquisite thing would vulgarise even Rubens and Paul Veronese."
The amount of work done by Watteau, accused by his friend De Caylus of idleness, was enormous. A chronological list is almost impossible, because many of his works are lost or were destroyed during the Revolution.
Watteau painted anything and everything, during his connection with Gillot and Audran, from pictures to powder-boxes, never considering that his art was too high and lofty for the embellishment of any object suitable for painting upon. His work may be divided into three classes: first manner--Italian Comedy and decorative work; second--Military Scenes; third and finest manner--The Pastorals.
As a boy he produced some military pictures, and he reverted to them while with Audran. It is difficult to place chronologically any given subject, for while we may arbitrarily classify a picture as belonging to one period or another, his Italian Comedy scenes, belonging to the first period, persisted to the end.
With the exception of his boyish endeavours, inspired by Teniers before he visited Paris, his first manner was almost entirely decorative, and included paintings on screens, coach panels, and furniture. The military pictures belong to a short period dating from his success in selling them to Sirois and their approval by the Academy. They are few in number--thirteen only were engraved.
The year 1712 was the beginning of his recognition and the end of poverty. Between this date and 1716 he produced his marvellous nudes. Of all Watteau's pictures the nudes seem undoubtedly to have been painted from Nature and not from drawings. They are too true to life, too well observed. All his other pictures, even the greatest of his Pastorals, have the air of being imagined. His drawings were his documents, and these, like the nudes, were of course made direct from Nature. The fantasy of his pictures is founded on fact, but it is fantasy which sees only what it wishes to see--the rhythmic line, the rainbow colour, the happy melancholy.
The year 1716 was big with significance to Watteau; he awoke in his own land--dream-land of his Pastorals. Then he began to live, and there were before him but five short years of life. He never again left this land of fantasy--except when, on his return from London, he painted "Gersaint's Sign," that model of modishness and grace, painted in eight mornings, representing Gersaint's shop where _élégantes_ buy masterpieces from shop-keepers as elegant as themselves. This picture, which is now in the possession of the German Emperor, has for some mysterious reason been divided into two portions.
In 1717, as I have related, he finished after a long delay his _pièce de reception_ for the Academy, the famous first study for the "Embarkment for Cythera." What can be said of this picture, or of the more finished replica at Potsdam, that has not already been said a score of times? It is referred to and described in the Prologue to this book as one of his significant pictures. It moves in a rhythm of life, of love, of colour; rose reds, golden yellows, faint purples, greys of every gamut, meeting and melting--one perfect whole, and over all is a lingering regret of "I know not what." This picture was painted in seven days, and elaborated, but hardly improved, in the Potsdam version.
Turn from this consummate work to his early "La Vraie Gaieté," inspired by Teniers, which in essence is the same picture as "The Ball under a Colonnade" at Dulwich, and even the "Amusements Champêtres" and the "Champs Elysées" at Hertford House. The clothes are changed, the handling has become lighter and more accomplished--that is all. The observer, that saturnine, detached, cynical figure, who appears in so many of Watteau's pictures, is already present in "La Vraie Gaieté." 'This solitary figure is, as I have already said, the symbol of Watteau himself, ever aloof, ever contemptuous, even when sharing in the scenic world of Watteau, where life, if not really true, is certainly not false. His people are lotus-eaters, who are come to a land where it is always afternoon, where "the charmed sunset lingered low adown in the red west ... and many a winding vale and meadow, set with slender galingale." A mild melancholy possesses the inhabitants of this dream-world, for they are happy and yet a little sad, musing on what can never be. Through this dream-world "L'Indifférent" trips lightly, typical of Watteau, rainbow-hued, mercurial, his indifference assumed, not troubling to conceal the sad thoughtfulness that lurks in his expression. We do not believe in his snapping fingers and his jaunty air. What colour are his beautiful garments? Rosy white, greeny white, lavendar white with rose red knots, and rose red mantle lined with bluebell blue, white frills falling over the sensitive hands, his butterfly decorations rustling as he passes--"L'Indifférent." The technique of the picture, in its modern chromatic use of colour, is marvellous. The hues of the rainbow meander through it all. Who can describe Watteau's colour or his fashion of trickling on the paint, as fascinating in its way as the method of Frans Hals, whose seduction is "the way he paints," not what he paints? Hals, the great master of character, frank, open, plebeian, is akin in technique to Watteau. What æsthetic joy these masters of technique give us as we study the manipulation of their paint. Hals flicks on his ruffles frankly, joyously--brutally. Watteau, seemingly just for joy in the colour, trickles--there is no other word for it--one luscious colour over another, like liquid jewels embedded in gold. One may stand for hours at Hertford House in front of any of his pictures and quite forget the subject in delight of the workmanship.
Consider "The Music Lesson." In colour it is rose and white. The man's garments are neither rose, nor white, nor yellow, and yet they are all three. The rose of the woman's rosette repeats the carmines of her complexion. The composition is charming. The movement, pose, and costume of the players is the same as the musicians in the "Musical Party," also at Hertford House. Delightful too in "Gilles and His Family." Gilles is dressed in thin, white, supple satin, lined with rose and striped with faint blue, and his white mantle is lined with blue. The dark bias of the guitar binds the group of people together, all of whom it touches or crosses. A seated woman nurses a little black and white dog, while a child nestles up to her, peeping beneath the guitar; the faces are more alert and smiling than usual, and the picture, although less pearly than "The Music Lesson," is not less beautiful in colour.
"Jupiter and Antiope" at the Louvre suggests Titian and Rubens filtered through Watteau. This nude studied from life, not painted from his drawings, is more laboured than his other pictures, but the loss of spontaneity in the colour is compensated by the truth and beauty of the abandon of the beautiful limbs in repose. Brown Jupiter, blonde Venus--no attenuation of the truth here--lights loaded, browns rich, with pearly reflections on the fair skin.
The attribution of the delightful "Pastoral" at the Louvre, although generally accepted, has been questioned. The elegant little lady shepherdess is in rose red, a red that seems to belong only to Velazquez and to Watteau; she sits watching, not the flock of one sheep and one wondering dog, no! she is listening to the Arcadian shepherd playing his flute. Very Watteau-like is the landscape.
Turn from these little works to the larger pictures, such as "The Return from the Chase," painted for his patron M. de Julienne towards the end of his life--a marvel of rhythmic line and tone; and to "Les Amusements Champêtres"--a bouquet of colour like no other colour, old rose, old blue, silvery yellow, prune purple, all partaking one of the other. In the distance people are sitting and standing and dancing in colours unrivalled.
So we may pass through the whole range of his production finding constantly some new surprise of colour, some new mastery in the weaving of his webs. Call Watteau, if you like, a painter of the frivolous side of life, but you must also call him one of the few originals whose pictures vivify because they stimulate, and because they excite interest in his method which marked a new epoch in art. "We consider Watteau," says his countryman, M. Camille Mauclair, "the most original and most representative master of French art; Watteau, Delacroix, and Monet are the three beacons of that art."
III
HIS PLACE IN ART: PREDECESSORS AND INFLUENCE
If I were asked what new thing Watteau gave to the world, I would answer that he humanised the art of his country and century, and drew men from pomposity to his own intimate and dream-like reality under the symbols of gallantry and masquerade. He was also the pioneer of impressionism, the discoverer of the decomposition of tones, and the link, to quote M. Mauclair, that connects Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain with Turner, Monticelli, and Claude Monet.
The eighteenth century in France which he inaugurated is a sunlit garden full of flowers compared to a cold court in some prison palace, to which the seventeenth century of academic imitation of the lesser Italians may be likened. Correct, pompous, lifeless, Le Brun, Le Sueur, and his other forerunners, have left us little but a sense of boredom, a warning how not to paint, and the assurance that, unless a school is founded on a personal study of Nature, that school dies with its founder. The decadence of Italian art is said to date from Raphael. Certain it is that bombastic art dates from the greatest artist--Michelangelo. The father of the chromo is Correggio.
Watteau, a "little master," as some are pleased to call him, has had an influence on art that persists to-day, an influence intimate and human. Certainly he made life more beautiful. Departing for Cythera with Watteau's dames and gallants means more to us of intelligence in art than acres of classic pictures of gods, temples and heroes untouched by the warmth of personality and incisiveness of observation. We are fatigued and unconvinced in the rooms at the Louvre devoted to Le Sueur's series of pictures depicting the life of St. Bruno. We are glad before the little earnest portraits of Corneille, Clouet, and Fouquet hanging in the next room. The love of beauty and the simple religion of the Primitives is transferred to us. We feel it to be true that "Nothing can wash the balm from an anointed king," in looking at the portrait of Charles I., king, dandy, and gentleman, touched as it is with Van Dyck's great gift of personal vision; but Le Sueur and Le Brun say nothing, except perhaps to make us grudge the wall space their pictures occupy.
Watteau is the lure that led France back to Nature; his real-unreal pleasances are the gardens where grew the flowers (slips from older stock, if you will) called Modern Movement, Impressionism, and Pointillism. "The Embarkment for Cythera" has been called the first impressionist picture. Once again through Watteau the natural art of the North prevailed over the art of the South as in the time of the Burgundian Franco-Flemish renaissance.
Watteau is true successor to his masters Teniers and Rubens. Teniers' subjects may be said to persist to the end of his short but full artistic life, and his _Fêtes Galantes_, those perfect expressions of his matured art, are Teniers' subjects made his own; but the uncouth Flemish peasants become graceful dames and gallants. Teniers' boors rollick through the day and night boisterously, leaving nothing for to-morrow, unless it be a headache. Watteau's dames and gallants are touched with happy melancholy. Their light malady of heartache for unattained desires is obviously more beautiful pictorially than the headaches of hilarious boors.
Your true artist has delicate _antennæ_ and is sensitive to everything that he sees and feels; but when he retires within himself, the memory of all that he felt, of warmth or cold, fine or unfine, returns to him. The influence of many men Watteau felt. I place them in the order of their influence--Teniers, Rubens, Gillot, Audran, Titian, and Veronese. The example of each taught him something, but the artist in him selected ingredients of their genius and combined them into a new and original one--his own.
The wholesome influence of Rubens on painters has been enormous. He did not make imitators, but he inspired many great men to "get the look of their own eyes," not the look of his; robust, normal, and generous of nature, the contagion of his truth is so immediate that all who come in contact with it must look at Nature unblinkingly, and receive a fresh impulse from his bravery. Velazquez was a better painter after he had talked and worked on the hillside above the Escorial with Rubens; Van Dyck was his pupil, and Watteau is of his artistic progeny. The feminine taste of Velazquez, Van Dyck, and Watteau was made more virile by contact with Rubens, whose taste many of us may condemn, and whose influence for good we are so apt to overlook.
From Titian Watteau borrowed warmth, and from Veronese coolness of colour; Gillot, the decorative painter, showed him his own inherent power; Audran, too, helped him, and the Luxembourg Gardens and Gallery aided his artistic development.
No doubt the great artist might be shut in a cell, and still his genius would bring forth its work unnourished by influence or propinquity to other talents; it might even show a rarer quality. But ninety-nine in a hundred derive from their forebears, and it is interesting to follow the career of a great man, to pursue the influences that formed him, and to see in the end how his individuality asserted itself. It were churlish in any student and lover of Watteau not to know and acknowledge the happy effect upon him of the masters he admired.
Watteau was of Flemish origin, for Valenciennes, where he was born, became French only seven years before his birth. Conquest cannot in seven years change the characteristics of a people. Watteau's art is consequently distinctly Flemish, but modified by French taste; he became an artistic composite of Flemish technical sanity and French intelligence and fervour. He was an exotic that shot up in the forcing-house of his exacting genius, extracting vitality from Rubens the fertiliser, inspiration from Teniers, colour from Titian and Veronese, and encouragement from Gillot and Audran. Genius is a great gift lent by Nature to the few; but Nature is inexorable in demanding the return of the fruits of the gift, as if man were but a casket for its safe keeping; when the end comes he must have proved his worth as custodian, be the time long, as in the case of a Da Vinci or a Michaelangelo, or short, as in the case of a Raphael or a Watteau.
The shorter the time given for the justification of the gift the stronger often is the capacity for effort, so that the sum total of the achievement of the short life often seems to exceed that of the long life.
Michaelangelo lived to be very old. When this "greatest artist" died he left his work unfinished. Raphael died young, but his achievement was prodigious. Watteau's short sad life of illness and discontent produced more than twelve hundred items.
Watteau began his artistic career influenced in technique by the _petits toucheurs_, the sympathetic little masters of the Netherlands to whom he was kin (M. de Julienne calls him in his catalogue "_peintre Flamand de L'Academie Royale_"). Soon the big touch of Rubens intrudes and the technique broadens; next Titian obsesses him, and the shadows under the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens as he watches grow warmer to the watcher, and colour begins to glow; Veronese intervenes, and cooler tones are apparent--and these three great masters of breadth and truth, of warmth and temperament, of chill stateliness, combine in the mind's eye of Watteau. The pleasant places in the gardens of the Luxembourg are peopled with ladies and gallants and "little ladies" and "little gallants," and, as he walks and watches, Teniers' subjects flit across his vision, and the forms of Rubens' rosy and ample matrons.
How would Titian have painted yonder dark woman of the warm colour and deep red hair walking down the glade? The leaves on the trees rustle in the summer air. Light flickers on silken frocks, cold reflections on green. Something whispers to his discontent "paint the scene as you see it," draw the lady sitting on the grass, her back toward you, in the shot silk frock of bronze and green, and the other standing near, tall and elegant, in rose and yellow. What colour is it? "The colour of a sun-browned wood-nymph's thigh." And her hands behind her back. What hands! "Hands must be better painted than heads, being more difficult."
Beyond in the gardens fountains and little children play; tall trees throw shadows on beauty pouting, the indifferent lover tip-toes away, not so indifferent as he would have the pouting one believe. There is movement toward the gates of the Palace Gardens; children run tripping over tiny dogs led by lute string ribbons; soldiers and music.