Watteau’s Cythera.

In 1712 Watteau tried once more to go to Italy. He did not succeed, but he was accepted by the Académie as a painter of fêtes galantes—outdoor entertainments in which the courtiers often dressed in rural costumes—for his presentation of a scene depicting actors in a garden. Between 1710 and 1712 he had painted the first of his three versions of the “L’Embarquement pour l’île de Cythère.” The myth of the island of Cythera, or of love, has distant roots in French and Italian culture, in which the journey is depicted as a difficult quest. Watteau’s Cythera, by comparison, is a paradise wavering in the ephemeral and in artifice; it represents an invitation to delights amid the enchantment of nature. It is an island toward which the pilgrims embark but never arrive, preserving it preserves its light only if it remains far on the horizon.

Watteau’s first version of the subject is anecdotal: it illustrates a comedy motif in a vaguely Venetian ambience. The second—which is the most beautiful—has the aspect of a profane ritual in an unreal, immense, and almost frighteningly empty landscape. In the third, in which cherubim flutter around a golden gondola, the subject has become vulgarized. Common to all three versions is a theatrical, almost scenographic, composition, a chromatic transposition of all that is suggested in the theatrical universe. The wonderlands of opera, romance, and epic are all evoked by Watteau’s Cythera, which represents the country of the impossible dream, the revenge of madness on reason, and of freedom on rules and morality. According to one hypothesis, the theme was suggested to Watteau by a prose play, Les Trois Cousines (1700), by Florent Dancourt, in the finale of which a group of country youths, disguised as pilgrims of love, prepare to embark on the voyage to the island of Cythera. Since this story of rustic millers is parodistic in intent and quite different from the refined scene that Watteau set in an unreal Venice, it is more probable that Watteau was inspired by an opéra ballet of Houdar de la Motte, La Vénitienne (1705), in which the invitation to the island of love includes not only the pilgrims of Cythera but also the stock characters of the commedia dell’arte—that is, both of the great themes that Watteau pursued all his life.

Period of his major works.

Despite his growing fame, Watteau remained shy, misanthropic, dissatisfied with himself, “libertine in spirit, but prudent in morals.” There is little information concerning him from 1712 until 1715, when he was introduced to the very rich financier Pierre Crozat, who had just returned from Italy. There, on behalf of the Regent, Crozat had been negotiating for the acquisition of Queen Christina’s art collection. A Watteau enthusiast, Crozat invited the painter to take up quarters in his residence, as was the custom among wealthy art lovers. Crozat had a great collection of Italian and Flemish paintings and drawings, including Correggio, the Venetian masters, and Van Dyck, and as Crozat’s guest, Watteau profitably applied the lessons of the Italian masters. He also painted the gardens and the countrysides surrounding the villa at Montmorency. Watteau left his rich patron out of a desire for freedom, although he remained his friend. Thenceforth he lived in seclusion and solitude. This was the period of the birth of his masterpieces: the “Conversations,” the “Divertissements champêtres,” the “Fêtes galantes.” In 1717 he presented to the Académie, of which he had become a member, the second version of “L’Embarquement pour l’île de Cythère.” Two years later he was in London, where his works were in great demand and where he also wanted to consult a famous physician about his health, which had been failing for some time. In London he limited himself to executing very few paintings, one of which was for his doctor on a subject very dear to him, “Italian Comedians.”

Hardly a year later, in 1720, Watteau was back in France. In only eight days he painted the now-famous signboard for the shop of his art dealer friend Gersaint. Among his last works was “Gilles,” a portrait of a clown in white painted as a signboard for the Théâtre de la Foire. White as innocence (or imbecility) and roseate in complexion, “Gilles” is the image of the actor during intermission—the actor who offers himself every day to the laughter of his fellows, the uncomprehending victim of a ceremony the full meaning of which seems to evade him. He is represented in a grandness that recalls Rembrandt’s “Christ Presented to the People” (“Ecce Homo”). At the other extreme is the signboard that Watteau painted for Gersaint: it portrays an art dealer’s shop in which a morose painting of Louis XIV is being symbolically stored away, as if to mark the end of his great reign. Although there are a number of figures, the protagonist of the picture is painting itself, as if Watteau at the end of his life were consecrating his art to eternity. By now Watteau was worn down by tuberculosis, and he died at the age of 37.

Themes and influences.

Watteau’s art exemplifies the profound influence of the theatre as a motif of inspiration on the painting of the 18th century. The strongest influence on his work was exercised not by solemn tragedy but by the most ephemeral theatrical forms. One major influence was the commedia dell’arte, in which words count significantly less than gestures, a theatre linked to the actor, who brings his own routines with him. Another influence was the opéra ballet, with its grand display of fleeting images embodied by the dance, the singing, the costumes, and the decorations. Watteau belonged to a period of reaction against the classicism of the preceding era, in which division of the arts and of the separation of styles had been strictly observed. An attempt was thus made to ennoble the genres previously considered inferior (farce, improvised comedy, the novel), and bold transpositions from one form of art to the other were ventured, as in the fusion of poetry, music, painting, and dance into the new genre of opera. In many cases Watteau’s painting is a chromatic transposition of the world of the opera.

Watteau interpreted his era in forms so delicate and evanescent that they seem to suggest the illnesses of the culture. In the quarrel that raged between Ancients and Moderns, Watteau seems instinctively to have sided with the Moderns. For him antiquity and its great heroes were dead. His adoration of the present and its refined modernity, and fashion bordered on frivolousness. On the other hand, he rejected every form of picturesque realism. His conception of Parnassus, the home of the gods of ancient Greece, resembles the Paris of his time, which he often reduced to the dimensions of a stage. Watteau was immersed in the ephemeral. Women reign in his paintings. Men—cavaliers or clowns—are there to please the women who glide by, enfolded in their splendid silken raiments. The statues in the parks are almost always statues of women. And even nature is feminine: trees with slender trunks, rich with a soft and uncertain foliage.