Jean-Antoine Watteau Biography

Jean-Antoine Watteau Biography

Jean-Antoine Watteau was perhaps the definitive painter of the Rococo Age. He was born in 1684 in Valenciennes, once a part of Flanders and since a few years prior to Watteau's birth, the newly annexed property of the French king Lous XIV. Watteau had an unhappy childhood, partly due to his own difficult temperament and partly due to his father, an equally difficult carpenter, who had no sympathy for his son's artistic inclinations. He allowed him to be apprenticed to the town painter Jacques-Albert Gerin, but made things tough by cutting off all monetary assistance.

When he was eighteen, in 1702, Watteau left home and went to Paris, that Mecca of all aspiring artists, hoping no doubt to find a more congenial atmosphere. The Parisian art scene was very exciting at the time, with attention shifting from Antiquity to Reality and the bold, vividly colored works of Peter Paul Rubens receiving more admiration than the subdued ones of the earlier Society darling, Nicolas Poussin. Watteau, talented and ambitious, hoped to make his mark in this city. As he found out, having artistic dreams was one thing and living the artistic reality quite another. He worked for a time in a Pont Notre-Dame workshop, copying popular Dutch and Flemish paintings. It was hard work, for very little pay, and he nearly starved. Never strong to begin with, his hardships greatly undermined his subsequent health.

His situation improved when, in 1703, he became acquainted with the stage designer Claude Gillot. Gillot, who was famous for his paintings of the Italian actors of the commedia dell'Arte, saw potential in the young Watteau and offered him an apprentice position in his studio. The two men ultimately didn't get along, but during his time in Gillot's studio, Watteau received intensive training in painting stage scenery, the effects of which can be discerned clearly in a majority of his later works. In most of these, you get the impression of viewing a drama setting, and only Watteau's delicacy of touch manages to make it is less stagey than that of, say, Hogarth. The characters peopling his works don't seem all that conscious of the audience, unless they are looking at you directly and smiling as if to take a bow for the performance.

After leaving Claude Gillot's studio, Watteau found another apprentice position, this time with the arabesque painter, Claude Audran. Aside from being a decorator he famously made the drawings for the ceiling decorations of the suite belonging to the 13 year old Duchess of Burgundy, who was the fiance of the French King's eldest grand-son - Audran was the overseer of the Luxembourg Palace in Paris and Watteau spent a lot of his time there. The wild environs of the Palace - this was before the establishment of the famous Luxembourg Gardens inspired Watteau to turn to landscape painting. He fell in love with the genre and if you study the landscape backgrounds of his later paintings, they appear to have a lingering touch of the Luxembourg wilds in them.

Another great thing about living at the Luxembourg Palace was the easy access it afforded him to the royal picture gallery. Here he was able to study in entirety Peter Paul Rubens's famous painting series on the life of Queen Maria de Medici. This series, in the present age, can be viewed at the Louvre.

The realism and dash of Rubens was to greatly influence Watteau's work. Although Watteau's paintings are much smaller in size meant for the drawing room rather than the palace hall and are seeped in a dreamy and rather ethereal atmosphere, the people he painted are very much rooted in reality. There is no sign of the gods and goddesses of Antiquity, unless presented as statues around which the real people mill. His most well-known paintings depict people from the rich, rather decadent set that spent their days in the aimless pursuit of pleasure. They play, they walk in gardens, they have parties, they court one another. One thing they never seem to do is work. What the hard-working artist really thought of such giddy beings is not noted but probably not very much there always seems to be a melancholic and empty touch to all the gaiety, like the aristocratic players are deceiving themselves and the viewer. Their existence, for all their obvious riches, their attractive movements, and their shimmering and exquisitely colored silk clothes, is ultimately devoid of any real meaning. Seeing this, perhaps it is not surprising that it was not this aristocratic set, but in fact the bourgeois then, as now, aspiring for the frivolous life-styles of the rich and famous that mainly bought these paintings.

After the Luxembourg stretch, Watteau went back to Paris in 1709, his hopes pinned on winning the Prix de Rome and proceeding to Italy to study art more seriously. However that didn't come about it took a second attempt, in 1712, for him to win the coveted prize. And this time the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was so impressed with him, they awarded him a full membership - as Painter of Fetes Galantes - instead of the much-hoped for one year stint in Rome. As a new member, he was supposed to present the Academy with a 'reception piece', but, no doubt slightly miffed with the honor, Watteau took five years to deliver the work. This is the one that he is most known for - the famous and questionably titled 'Embarquement pour l'Ile de Cythere' (Pilgrimage to Cythera) the jury is still out on whether the lovers are on their way to Cythera, the mythological Island birthplace of Venus (signifying the beginning of love), or are leaving it (signifying the end of love).

In the meantime, he established a close friendship with the rich banker and art collector, Pierre Crozat, who owned a magnificent collection of Venetian art that included the works of Titian and Veronese. These provided another positive influence on Watteau's artistic development.

With full membership of the Academy, acquaintance with important people, and a growing interest in his works, Watteau seemed poised for still greater things. However these were not to come. Around 1717 he contracted tuberculosis and this illness a virtual death sentence in those times was another reason for the sadness apparent in his works. For a while he attempted to fight back, even moving to England in 1720 in the hope that the climate would suit him. It didn't and, with his health rapidly failing, he returned to France and took up quiet country living and religion. Always temperamental and difficult, he grew mellow and considerate as can be seen by the anecdote from this period concerning him and his apprentice Jean-Baptiste Pater. Watteau had kicked him out for copying his style, which would have meant a permanent exile a few years earlier, but now Watteau decided to give the young chap another chance and had him recalled. Jean-Baptiste Pater never achieved Watteau's success, but remains in Art History as the chap that received instruction in originality from him in his very last week.

On 18 July 1721, in the Nogent-sur-Marne country house of his friend Gersaint, Watteau succumbed to the disease. He was only 37 at the time and left behind some twenty thousand paintings and a considerable body of drawings.

His works greatly influenced later artists like Chardin, Boucher, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Picasso.

Famous paintings by Antoine Watteau -

Gilles and his Family (1716; Wallace Collection, London)

Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717; Louvre Museum, Paris)

The Delicate Musician (1717;Louvre Museum, Paris)