Word: watteau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...paneling (see cut). To furnish the town house, Antique Dealer Arthur Vernay ransacked his own collection, sent scouts throughout Europe. The result has borne well the test of time. For the jade, Chinese porcelains, 18th-century French furniture, paneling, fixtures. Royal Beauvais tapestries by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, paintings by Watteau, Gainsborough, Lawrence, Romney and Raeburn. the current market will pay back the investment, and more than make up for the toll of inflation...
Artifice & Nature. Virginia's new Watteau dates from the period when he had first found his own formula for combining artifice with nature. For it was not in the mincing, grandiloquent French courtiers that Watteau found his prototypes but from among the mocking, high-spirited, slapstick players of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte. By placing them against the superb park landscapes he sketched in and around Paris, Watteau created a half-make-believe world of his own that paid homage to nothing but his own poetic imagination...
...time he painted Le Lorgneur, probably in 1716, Watteau was in his early 30s. Behind him lay an arduous apprenticeship to a Flemish painter in his native Valenciennes and his early struggles as a starving artist in Paris. Then two paintings of French army-camp scenes won him associate membership in the Royal Academy, and the greatest French collector of his time, Pierre Crozat, made room for Watteau in his own house...
Wrinkles in the Sky. In Le Lorgneur Watteau made use of his favorite technique of composition: he riffled through his countless drawings for characters to fit the scene. In this painting, the guitar player is his actor-friend Philippe Poisson. Ironically Watteau, who took great pains with his drawings, usually hurried his painting...
...Lorgneur the result was a slight wrinkling of the surface in the upper righthand sky. But Watteau had good reason for haste. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was always in failing health. Once, asked about the future, he replied: "Isn't the hospital the last resort? There, no one is refused admission." Instead it was in a country house outside Paris, where he hoped the fresh air would cure him, that Watteau died...