If I were asked what new thing Watteau gave to the world, I would answer that he humanised the art of his country and century, and drew men from pomposity to his own intimate and dream-like reality under the symbols of gallantry and masquerade. He was also the pioneer of impressionism, the discoverer of the decomposition of tones, and the link, to quote M. Mauclair, that connects Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain with Turner, Monticelli, and Claude Monet.

The eighteenth century in France which he inaugurated is a sunlit garden full of flowers compared to a cold court in some prison palace, to which the seventeenth century of academic imitation of the lesser Italians may be likened. Correct, pompous, lifeless, Le Brun, Le Sueur, and his other forerunners, have left us little but a sense of boredom, a warning how not to paint, and the assurance that, unless a school is founded on a personal study of Nature, that school dies with its founder. The decadence of Italian art is said to date from Raphael. Certain it is that bombastic art dates from the greatest artist—Michelangelo. The father of the chromo is Correggio.

Watteau, a "little master," as some are pleased to call him, has had an influence on art that persists to-day, an influence intimate and human. Certainly he made life more beautiful. Departing for Cythera with Watteau's dames and gallants means more to us of intelligence in art than acres of classic pictures of gods, temples and heroes untouched by the warmth of personality and incisiveness of observation. We are fatigued and unconvinced in the rooms at the Louvre devoted to Le Sueur's series of pictures depicting the life of St. Bruno. We are glad before the little earnest portraits of Corneille, Clouet, and Fouquet hanging in the next room. The love of beauty and the simple religion of the Primitives is transferred to us. We feel it to be true that "Nothing can wash the balm from an anointed king," in looking at the portrait of Charles I., king, dandy, and gentleman, touched as it is with Van Dyck's great gift of personal vision; but Le Sueur and Le Brun say nothing, except perhaps to make us grudge the wall space their pictures occupy.

Watteau is the lure that led France back to Nature; his real-unreal pleasances are the gardens where grew the flowers (slips from older stock, if you will) called Modern Movement, Impressionism, and Pointillism. "The Embarkment for Cythera" has been called the first impressionist picture. Once again through Watteau the natural art of the North prevailed over the art of the South as in the time of the Burgundian Franco-Flemish renaissance.

Watteau is true successor to his masters Teniers and Rubens. Teniers' subjects may be said to persist to the end of his short but full artistic life, and his FÊtes Galantes, those perfect expressions of his matured art, are Teniers' subjects made his own; but the uncouth Flemish peasants become graceful dames and gallants. Teniers' boors rollick through the day and night boisterously, leaving nothing for to-morrow, unless it be a headache. Watteau's dames and gallants are touched with happy melancholy. Their light malady of heartache for unattained desires is obviously more beautiful pictorially than the headaches of hilarious boors.

Your true artist has delicate antennÆ and is sensitive to everything that he sees and feels; but when he retires within himself, the memory of all that he felt, of warmth or cold, fine or unfine, returns to him. The influence of many men Watteau felt. I place them in the order of their influence—Teniers, Rubens, Gillot, Audran, Titian, and Veronese. The example of each taught him something, but the artist in him selected ingredients of their genius and combined them into a new and original one—his own.

The wholesome influence of Rubens on painters has been enormous. He did not make imitators, but he inspired many great men to "get the look of their own eyes," not the look of his; robust, normal, and generous of nature, the contagion of his truth is so immediate that all who come in contact with it must look at Nature unblinkingly, and receive a fresh impulse from his bravery. Velazquez was a better painter after he had talked and worked on the hillside above the Escorial with Rubens; Van Dyck was his pupil, and Watteau is of his artistic progeny. The feminine taste of Velazquez, Van Dyck, and Watteau was made more virile by contact with Rubens, whose taste many of us may condemn, and whose influence for good we are so apt to overlook.

From Titian Watteau borrowed warmth, and from Veronese coolness of colour; Gillot, the decorative painter, showed him his own inherent power; Audran, too, helped him, and the Luxembourg Gardens and Gallery aided his artistic development.

No doubt the great artist might be shut in a cell, and still his genius would bring forth its work unnourished by influence or propinquity to other talents; it might even show a rarer quality. But ninety-nine in a hundred derive from their forebears, and it is interesting to follow the career of a great man, to pursue the influences that formed him, and to see in the end how his individuality asserted itself. It were churlish in any student and lover of Watteau not to know and acknowledge the happy effect upon him of the masters he admired.

Watteau was of Flemish origin, for Valenciennes, where he was born, became French only seven years before his birth. Conquest cannot in seven years change the characteristics of a people. Watteau's art is consequently distinctly Flemish, but modified by French taste; he became an artistic composite of Flemish technical sanity and French intelligence and fervour. He was an exotic that shot up in the forcing-house of his exacting genius, extracting vitality from Rubens the fertiliser, inspiration from Teniers, colour from Titian and Veronese, and encouragement from Gillot and Audran. Genius is a great gift lent by Nature to the few; but Nature is inexorable in demanding the return of the fruits of the gift, as if man were but a casket for its safe keeping; when the end comes he must have proved his worth as custodian, be the time long, as in the case of a Da Vinci or a Michaelangelo, or short, as in the case of a Raphael or a Watteau.

The shorter the time given for the justification of the gift the stronger often is the capacity for effort, so that the sum total of the achievement of the short life often seems to exceed that of the long life.

Michaelangelo lived to be very old. When this "greatest artist" died he left his work unfinished. Raphael died young, but his achievement was prodigious. Watteau's short sad life of illness and discontent produced more than twelve hundred items.

Watteau began his artistic career influenced in technique by the petits toucheurs, the sympathetic little masters of the Netherlands to whom he was kin (M. de Julienne calls him in his catalogue "peintre Flamand de L'Academie Royale"). Soon the big touch of Rubens intrudes and the technique broadens; next Titian obsesses him, and the shadows under the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens as he watches grow warmer to the watcher, and colour begins to glow; Veronese intervenes, and cooler tones are apparent—and these three great masters of breadth and truth, of warmth and temperament, of chill stateliness, combine in the mind's eye of Watteau. The pleasant places in the gardens of the Luxembourg are peopled with ladies and gallants and "little ladies" and "little gallants," and, as he walks and watches, Teniers' subjects flit across his vision, and the forms of Rubens' rosy and ample matrons.

How would Titian have painted yonder dark woman of the warm colour and deep red hair walking down the glade? The leaves on the trees rustle in the summer air. Light flickers on silken frocks, cold reflections on green. Something whispers to his discontent "paint the scene as you see it," draw the lady sitting on the grass, her back toward you, in the shot silk frock of bronze and green, and the other standing near, tall and elegant, in rose and yellow. What colour is it? "The colour of a sun-browned wood-nymph's thigh." And her hands behind her back. What hands! "Hands must be better painted than heads, being more difficult."

Beyond in the gardens fountains and little children play; tall trees throw shadows on beauty pouting, the indifferent lover tip-toes away, not so indifferent as he would have the pouting one believe. There is movement toward the gates of the Palace Gardens; children run tripping over tiny dogs led by lute string ribbons; soldiers and music.

Watteau finds himself, not wholly perhaps, but the formative period has passed. The artist is made; is himself, gives himself. No longer will the classicists prevail; no longer will art be cold and eclectic. The youth from Valenciennes will call Paris back to Nature, and through a temperament will show the world familiar things, will let his imagination play, taking his good where he finds it, but resolving it into something that is his own. He will see with his own eyes. He will paint pictures as he pleases.

PLATE VII.—FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE
(In the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Bleak Edinburgh is rich in the possession of this picture of dreamy colour. The hour is sunset; the place is where you will, but the title, "FÊte ChampÊtre," suits the scene of dalliance quite as well as any other name; a similar picture at Dresden is called by M. Mauclair "The Terrace Party." You perceive here the typical Watteau figures, and behind is a landscape that has all the idealistic charm of his rendering of Nature.