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For proof, should it be needed, that art prizes often fail to predict posterity’s winner, let’s head to early-eighteenth-century Paris, where the 1709 Prix de Rome has just been awarded to one Antoine Grison. Scraping second place is a rather more familiar name – that of Jean-Antoine Watteau.
Watteau’s lack of success at the age of 25 in scooping the biggest award of the day for emerging painters didn’t affect his fame, of course. Three centuries later, three new exhibitions – a stellar gathering of Watteau’s drawings at the Royal Academy, a grouping of the Wallace Collection’s formidable holdings of his paintings, alongside a show that presents the artist in the company of his contemporaries and influences – give as good a sense of this celebrated artist as we’re likely to see.
All three exhibitions deliver the froth of Regency France to London. Watteau – of humble beginnings and, so the story goes, of no fixed abode – appears enraptured by an haute monde newly invigorated after its release from the stultifying Versailles court of Louis XIV. Inspired by the theatrical scenes of his mentor, Claude Gillot, old masters such as Rubens, whose work he saw in the Palais du Luxembourg, and in the landscapes and vistas of the palace’s gardens, Watteau concocted a world of beauty and intrigue from fanciful fragments of contemporary Paris. It was a type of painting so new that a genre was created for him – the fête galante.
Refinement, recreation and romance may be the three Rs of the genre, yet the RA’s show quickly reveals Watteau’s art to be one of real substance. Red, black and, later, white chalk are used to exquisitely nuanced effect, not only in anticipated studies of fashionable togs or ample décolletage but in such works as ‘Two Shoeshine Boys’ (c1715), part of a series dedicated to France’s itinerant poor. Their plight must have struck a chord with Watteau, the impoverished outsider.
The brilliance of these drawings, what makes them seem so vibrant, lies partly in their compositional peculiarities. Watteau intended for them to act as a kind of catalogue of forms and postures, returning sometimes years later to add another study. Rather than fix his subjects in situ, he allows several sketches to float on the blank page – giving a sense of animation, or offering up startling juxtapositions. The temporal aspect of seeing changing positions, expressions and moods as in ‘Four Studies of a Woman’s Head’ (c1716-17), is thrilling.
Watteau preferred his drawings to his paintings and it’s difficult not to agree with his assessment. Reacquaintance in the Wallace Collection with the languorous liaisons of masterpieces such as ‘Rendez-vous de Chasse’ (c1717-18) reminds us of his great sense of compositional choreography, light and shadow but the focused brilliance of his works on paper is hard to sustain on a grand scale.
Historical context is amply served by the Wallace’s show of works, by Rembrandt, Rubens and Salvator Rosa among others, from the connoisseur collection of Watteau’s art dealer and great champion Jean de Jullienne. Watteau’s influence leaps from the Wallace’s many paintings by Fragonard and Boucher. Yet there is something so singular about Watteau – arguably Flemish rather than French, dead at 37, a secretive soul who created a new, highly erotic art but destroyed his most risqué works – that shirks all company. Part of his enduring appeal is that he stands quietly, defiantly apart.