Word: watteau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...annual Artists' Relief Exhibition netted more than $2,000 with pictures priced at $5-$50. U. S. sales of the year were a Charles Willson Peale Washington to the Brooklyn Museum (price undisclosed) ; an early Rembrandt of Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet to the Chicago Art Institute; Jean Antoine Watteau's Mezzetin to the Metropolitan Museum for some $250,000 (TIME, Dec. 17). The 1934 U. S. art turnover easily topped...
Jean Antoine Watteau was born to a Flemish coppersmith in 1684 in the town of Valenciennes. At 14 Jean Antoine began sulking to make his derisive father apprentice him to the best local painter. When he was 17, his master died and Watteau legged it for Paris. Starving, homeless, he had to sell his hat for food. In the shadow of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, he finally got a job painting the same picture of St. Nicolas over & over again for a wholesale picture shop. He rarely signed his work...
...Watteau was a gloomy neurotic who never married, never stayed long in one place, snubbed his friends, had neither morals nor vices, distrusted himself and his painting and worked stupendously. In 1716 the Italian comedians whom Louis XIV's prudish mistress, Maintenon, had banished 19 years before, were called back to France, and Watteau caught the vogue for them by painting Le Mezzetin...
...Watteau's greatest painting was the one he had to do to be received into the French Academy. 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...
...tuberculosis closed in quickly on Watteau. He was only 37, still moving from place to place, when he died near Vincennes...