Word: gersaint
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...Watteau tend to be short and sometimes contradictory; they blur when the traits of his possibly rather feckless, prickly character present themselves. He seems to have been solitary and misanthropic, though with flashes of antic gaiety: "A good friend but a difficult one," the dealer Edme-François Gersaint unhelpfully put it. Naturally one would like to know more; probably we never shall...
Nowhere is it more subtly used than in his largest and perhaps greatest painting, Gersaint's Shopsign, which was actually, though briefly, used as a sign above the dealer's premises on a Paris bridge. We are looking into a gallery that sells paintings and mirrors. The paintings are dimly legible; the mirrors are black, reflecting little. Three backs are turned: a pink cascading dress on the left, a lady and a gentleman scrutinizing a painting on the right. The sense of absorption-of a painter spying on people looking at art -is extreme...
...against everything grandiose and monumental; nothing could have appealed more to the nobility, so recently released from the blinding authority of the Sun King, than Watteau's languid and worry-free world of harlequins and sultry lovers and frolicking aristocrats. Watteau's shingle for the art dealer Gersaint was apparently done on whim, but it shows him at his most graceful and elegant. Watteau himself boasted of it, and it was one of the last things he painted. A few months after finishing it, he died of consumption...
...Five years after he had promised it, the Academy lost patience and gave him a month. In seven days Watteau dashed off the Embarquement pour Cythère. Again, to limber up his fingers, he painted in eight days the famed signboard for the decorator's shop of his friend Gersaint, which somebody later cut in two. Frederick the Great, however, picked up both halves...
...sale of the Michel Levy collection, Fragonard's Terrace Villa Réals brought 275,000 francs; Farmhouse, 115,000 francs; Head of a Philosopher, 415,000 francs. Watteau's Étude pour la Famille brought 260,000 francs; Enchanted Island, 475,000 francs; Enseigne de Gersaint, 470,000 francs. Twelve still life canvases by Chardin brought prices ranging from 26,000 francs to 220,000 francs, while his self-portrait reached 126,000 francs. Latour's Portrait of the Painter Silvestre went for 140,000 francs. Per-roneau's Portrait of the Painter Guille- quin...
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