Word: watteau
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There are only about 60 Watteau paintings on whose authenticity all experts agree, and his life is obscure. Since the Renaissance there have been few great artists about whom less is known than Watteau. He is almost as much of an enigma as Vermeer. He was born in Valenciennes in 1684, the son of a Flemish roof tiler. Until a few years before, Valenciennes was part of Flanders, not France; and Watteau's Flemish origins may have had more than a casual meaning to him, since the main influence on his work was Rubens. Nothing is known about...
...scandals attach to Watteau's name, although he was said to have burned a few paintings he considered obscene a few days before he died. If they were as exquisite as The Intimate Toilette, the little panel that is shown for the first time in this exhibition, the loss must be considered heavy. He never married. He kept no journal, and no undisputed letters by him survive. The only writings in his hand are a few banal jottings on the back of drawings. They do not contain a word about the theory of painting; perhaps he had none...
...circle of friends in Paris included some of the most cultivated men of the day, such as the financier Pierre Crozat (whose collection of old-master drawings was said to have completed young Watteau's aesthetic education) and the Flemish artist Nicolas Vleughels. But their memoirs of 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...
There were, of course, great differences between Rubens and his hierophant Watteau. One painted big, the other small; the tone of Watteau's paintings is always unofficial and intimate, very unlike the grand elocution of Rubens...
...Watteau managed to skim off Rubens' lustrous surface and endow it with a still greater sense of nuance, while leaving his master's tyrannous physicality behind. To look at his fētes champětres -those felicitously idealized gatherings of young lovers, planted on the unchanging lawn of a social Eden-is to think of pollen and silk, not flesh. Watteau was a great painter of the naked body, but his nudes tend to privacy and reflection. They are completely unlike Rubens' magniloquent blond wardrobes. He seems, for this reason, the more erotic artist...