Watteau :: PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

THE apparition of Watteau in France in the early eighteenth century may be likened to the apparition of Giotto in Italy in the early fourteenth. Each was a genius; each broke away from the herd; each gave to the world a new vision; each inspired a school. But there the resemblance ends. Giotto's art was Christian, Watteau's Pagan; or, in other words, Giotto lived in an age when the aim of art was to teach religion, Watteau—well, his pictures were designed to delight. Giotto sought to remind men of Christianity, to bring them humbly to their knees with representations (marvellously fresh in those days when art was still groping in the Byzantine twilight) of the life of the Founder of Christianity, all its pathos, pity, and promise. Watteau gave joy and exhiliration to a generation temporally dull and morose, chilled by the academical art of the period, and apparently content with it. Watteau appeared: the little world about him looked at his pictures and, what a change! "Paris dressed, posed, picnicked, and conversed À la Watteau."

Poor Watteau! He gave, he gives joy, but he was sad, discontented, distrustful of himself and others. Sometimes Nature makes a great effort and unites genius to the sane mind and the sane body, as in a Titian, a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a Goethe; more often she breathes genius into a fugitive and precarious shell, as in a Keats, a Francis Thompson, a Watteau, and ironically, or perhaps blessedly, gives them the phthisical temperament so that they crowd youth, adolescence, and age into a burst of hectic performances before they depart.

PLATE II.—THE BALL UNDER A COLONNADE
(In the Dulwich Gallery)

This picture has suffered somewhat from time. But how delightful it is still; how gracious and debonair are the two dancing figures; how fascinating the colour in the woman's green striped rose skirt, and in the man's blue butterfly dress. There are seventy-three figures in this small canvas 1 ft. 7¾ ins. by 2 ft. ¼ ins.

In the following pages the life and art of Watteau are considered, also the curious effect of that life and art upon his biographers, also, frightening word! his technique, his marvellous technique, which is a veritable tonic to painters, who know the almost intolerable difficulties of expression.

His life? Why, it could be told in a page. His art? It is all stated in any one of his significant pictures. He belonged to that class of unfortunates who are never at rest in this world. Life to him was a wandering to find home. Always beyond the hills, any place where he did not happen to be at the moment, gleamed the spires of the City of Happiness and Contentment, beckoning, waiting, rising against the sky like the towers of New Jerusalem in Taddeo di Bartoli's "Death of the Virgin." He fled from the boredom of his home in Valenciennes, yet he died longing to return.

Watteau revealed his temperament, on the wing as it were, in his masterpiece "The Embarkment for Cythera." These ethereal and butterfly pilgrims of love should be happy enough in their enchanted garden on the border of the azure sea, but no! they are preparing lackadaisically to depart, to be wafted in the ship with the rose-coloured sail to the Island of Cythera, the abode of Venus, whom they worship for the joy of worship, without any desire of possession. On those lovely shores they will find no continuing city. Watteau knows that. Oh! but he was a cynic was this Watteau whose palette was a rainbow, and whose vision was like the flash of a kingfisher's wing in sunlight. Do you remember his "FÊte ChampÊtre" at Dresden, with the little exquisite figure of a woman seated on the ground turning away from the spectator? Oh, her bright hair, and the dress—I am a man; but what a dress! What skill and knowledge in the drawing and painting of it! This little lady is essentially Watteau, who loved pretty clothes and budding figures, and whose drawing was as dainty as the frocks he composed; yet I do not think she is the real Watteau. Cast your eye to the left of the picture where stands an elderly, disdainful dandy. You meet this looker-on again and again in Watteau's pictures; he is in the FÊte ChampÊtre and yet not of it; he knows how little all this affectation of gaiety really signifies; how transient is this commerce with joy, and yet he lingers there because in Watteau's world there is naught else to do. Yet he himself was always doing—a great worker. He knew, like Zola, that work is the anodyne for the "malady of the infinite" or of self, whichever you like to call it; but he had no wish to teach. He used his art to escape from the world to a dream-realm, where the sun always shines and where Monday morning never comes.

What was he like, this "exquisite little master," restless, changeable, obstinate, irritable, and misanthropic, whose influence on art has been so great? In his portrait of himself engraved by Boucher, the slight, nervous figure, alert, on the point of a petulant outbreak, looks a genius, but a man "gey ill to live with." I have a keener if a sadder vision of him in a portrait drawn by himself, "frightfully thin, almost deathlike." It is called "Watteau Laughing." Frightfully thin, almost deathlike, himself drawn by himself—laughing. That is Watteau.

Clyx.com