Word: watteau
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Sixty years ago a good picture by Jean Antoine Watteau cost less than $500. Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum paid some $250,000 for its first Watteau painting. For $250,000 the Metropolitan in 1870, the year it was founded, could have bought every Watteau extant. Even in the last few years $250,000 would have bought two good Rembrandts, an El Greco, a couple of Gainsboroughs, several Rubens, at least one Goya, one Corot, and one Cézanne...
What the Metropolitan got last week for its money was Watteau's excellent Le Mezzetin, whose full title is Le Mezzetin jouant de la Guitare. In 1932 Soviet Russia needed ready cash, dug Le Mezzetin out of Leningrad's Hermitage Museum, sold it to Manhattan's Wildenstein Galleries. Wildenstein lent it last summer to Chicago's Century of Progress art show. It will be shown at the Metropolitan in January...
...Gainsborough, $10,000; a Romney, $16,000. Millet's The Knitting Lesson, once owned by the late Levi Zeigler Leiter, was sold to Manhattan's John Levy Galleries for $16,000-highest price for any French work. A Greuze self-portrait brought $14,000, a small Watteau, $9,400; a painting of the entrance to Rouen's Cathedral by Monet...
Among the artists represented are Boucher with seven drawings in colored chalks, Fragonard with four, and Watteau with four, Hubert Robert with 12 drawings in pen and wash, Ouardi with two drawings in sopia, and the younger Tiepole with three...
...Clutton-Brock has the slightly academic point of view of the illustrious but conservative paper for which he writes. The Baroque is to him anathema; and Boucher, but an insignificant follower of Watteau. Luckily he ends with the nineteenth century. One is frightened at what he would have done with the twentieth. And yet there is some good criticism...