Works by Jean-Antoine Watteau
104 works · 229 msCouples idling and courting out of doors with the air of a stage play: Jean-Antoine Watteau is credited with inventing this fête galante, and the actors of the Italian comedy were a lifelong passion.
A roofer's son from Valenciennes, he reached Paris in 1702 and copied Flemish and Dutch genre scenes in a workshop on the Pont Notre-Dame; in those years his sketch-like touch took shape. By 1705 he was assisting Claude Gillot, who brought him to the stock characters of the commedia dell'arte. Working next for the decorator Claude Audran, he saw the canvases Peter Paul Rubens painted for Marie de' Medici at the Luxembourg palace.
The Academy took him in as an associate in 1712, but only in 1717 did he hand over his reception piece, The Embarkation for Cythera. Couples in silk move downhill toward a gilded boat at the left, cupids wheel overhead, and the far shore fades into blue haze. In Pierrot, long called Gilles, an actor in white stands square to the front, arms hanging, while four companions appear lower down, half hidden by a bank.
A little over half the works below are paintings and about a third are drawings. Seated Woman, from 1716–17, is done in black, red and white chalk: a young woman glances back over her shoulder, a hand pressed to her chest. His last major picture, The Shop Sign of Gersaint of 1720, was a sign for his friend Gersaint's picture shop, with the front wall left out: porters crate a portrait at the left while customers study paintings hung frame to frame. Tuberculous laryngitis may have killed him in 1721, at 36.
Sources: Wikipedia, Charlottenburg Palace, Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Louvre.
