Word: watteau
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Because his scenes were bathed in an aura of privilege, many people still think of him as a court painter. Nothing could be further from the truth. After he died, Watteau's work appealed irresistibly to the high and mighty of Europe: Frederick the Great of Prussia had no fewer than 89 paintings by or in the manner of Watteau in his palaces at Potsdam, Sans Souci and Charlottenburg. Alive, Watteau had no time for courts, and little access to them anyway. He sensibly preferred the theater, whose troupes and characters he painted so often, shifting them from...
...heirs-Boucher, Pater, Lancret-would embody rococo. But Watteau died in 1721, just over a year before Louis XV was crowned. Thus the artist whose feathery trees and pastoral scenes of gallantry seem the very essence of rococo sensibility only reached the edge of the rococo. His time was that of Louis XIV, the Sun King. If the intimacy of his art seems so far from the bemusing pomp of Versailles, it is partly because his imitators lagged; it took time to convert the scenography of Watteau's fugitive, shadowed mind into a system of decor suitable...
...learns nothing about real history from these paintings. Outside the gilt frames, hysteria and massacre ruled. France was continuously at war for most of Watteau's life. In the winter of 1709, men ate corpses in the streets of Paris; the French economy was wrecked by a wave of delirious speculation whipped up by a Scottish financier, John Law. But on canvas, the Cytherean games never end. Men need paradises, however fictive, in times of trouble, and art is a poor conductor of historical events. One thinks of the impressionists constructing their scenes of pleasure through the days...
...there is another reason to connect Watteau with impressionism: the colloquial, almost chatty strand of improvisation that purls along the surface of his art without distracting from its depths. As with Renoir, his models were his friends. He drew them incessantly, in fine-pointed chalks -a red, a white and a black, the famous trois crayons -whose use he had learned from Rubens. Their faces and poses, rendered in that wiry, atmospheric line, became a collection of types, single figures like the Seated Woman that he would combine for his finished compositions...
...shop, Au Grand Monarque, but also to the death and burial of the Sun King himself. The shop sign is at once an elegy, a work of art criticism (for no painting on the walls is there by accident) and an inspired essay of social observation. It begins what Watteau would have done with his maturity. But a few months later his lungs were gone, and he was dead. -By Robert Hughes