In 1984 the three hundredth anniversary of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s start was celebrated with a unprecedented retrospective of his work, drawings, and prints, seen first in Washington, then in Paris and Berlin. That memorable exhibition, organized by the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, assembled some 73 work, 143 drawings, and eight etchings, and it was accompanied by a magisterial 580-page catalog in addition to a global symposium.1 In his overview of the exhibition Francis Haskell concluded, “It was given to [Watteau], as to no other single artist before or since, to enable much of his own century to see itself through his eyes—and for posterity to accept this vision as genuine.”2
No such fanfare accompanied the tricentenary of Watteau’s demise in 2021, when the world was nonetheless rising from the shutdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic.3 Nonetheless, previously 12 months Watteau has been the main focus of serious exhibitions in Chantilly, London, and Paris. Final spring on the Château de Chantilly—which can not lend works from the founder’s assortment to any exhibition—the gallery’s 4 work and 6 drawings by the artist, acquired between 1861 and 1891 by Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, served as some extent of departure for a gaggle of remarkable loans. Two of Chantilly’s most admired Watteau work—Le Donneur de sérénades and L’Amante inquiète—have been restored and cleaned in preparation for the present, with a spectacular transformation within the look of the latter, a well-preserved work on panel that now has an altogether surprising luminosity, readability, and freshness.
All of the Paris museums participated generously on this exhibition, and none extra so than the Louvre, which lent one of many best of its fifty-one Watteau drawings, the intensely transferring Three Heads of a Younger Man, which has a naturalism and sympathy which are communicated by way of the artist’s unsurpassed virtuosity. Dated to round 1717–1718, the drawing was undoubtedly comprised of life, the mannequin possible a servant hooked up to one of many grand households that Watteau frequented. The regent’s Edict of October 1716, “concerning Slaves from the Colonies,” had lately legalized the importation of enslaved Black servants hooked up to Frenchmen with colonial connections. So long as they have been registered with the admiralty and raised within the Catholic religion, enslaved domestics could possibly be retained by their masters indefinitely with out the precise to petition for his or her freedom, which provides Watteau’s tender depiction even larger poignancy.
Three Heads of a Younger Man had been one in all no fewer than seventy-nine drawings by Watteau—sixty-one of that are thought of authentic at this time—owned within the nineteenth century by a rich London corn service provider, Andrew James. The Gentleman’s Journal famous in its obituary in September 1854 that James was
a person of the very best integrity, gentle but decided…[with] a eager notion of all that’s stunning in nature and tremendous in artwork, who possessed among the choicest drawings of the previous and fashionable masters which are to be discovered on this nation.
In 1856 his assortment was proven by his widow to Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the German artwork historian and former director of the Berlin Museum, who included an outline of it in his fashionable Galleries and Cupboards of Artwork in Nice Britain (1857). Waagen famous that the gathering was famend primarily for its Rembrandts and likewise celebrated for works by the “clever painter” Watteau, with “a large number of studies from nature for his pictures, chiefly on grey [sic] paper, executed in red, black, and white chalks, with great breadth and mastery, and with the utmost animation of conception.” “In the hands of Mrs. James,” he concluded, “all these treasures are preserved with more than common reverence.” The gathering, maintained intact by the couple’s single daughter, Sarah Ann James, was bought at public sale at Christie’s in June 1891. 13 of the Watteau drawings entered the British Museum shortly thereafter. They characterize at this time slightly below one third of its forty-four works by him, all of which have been on view through the summer time in a fantastic present.4
“A New Look at Watteau, an Actor with No Lines: Pierrot, Known as Gilles” on the Louvre was probably the most vital of the three exhibitions targeted on the artist. This excellent present of sixty-four works was dedicated to Pierrot, one in all Watteau’s best, most transferring—and most enigmatic—work. It was accompanied by a wonderful catalog by Guillaume Faroult, with an indispensable part by Clarisse Delmas and Bénédicte Trémolières on the restoration of the canvas by the Louvre’s conservation division, accomplished in 2024. The enterprise doubly fulfilled the exhortation by Pierre Rosenberg, doyen of Watteau students, in 1984 that “this painting deserves to be the subject of its own book or exhibition.”
Watteau’s monumental work, painted round 1718–1719, reveals 5 actors from the comedian theater and a donkey open air in a sylvan setting of parasol pines and poplars, with the stone herm of a faun rising from the leaves. (We’re maybe on the grounds of an aristocratic nation home.) The central, dominant determine is Pierrot, arms hanging by his facet, wearing his conventional white costume: a taupe felt hat over a white skullcap, a cotton jacket whose sleeves are too lengthy and bunch on the elbows, satin trousers falling above the ankles, and splendid rose ribbons on his satin sneakers. Darkish-eyed and dark-haired, with sweeping eyebrows, Watteau’s Pierrot is a younger man who doesn’t but must shave commonly. His expression is critical however inscrutable. Not like his precise counterparts on the stage, who typically carried out with white powder on their faces, Watteau’s Pierrot is portrayed with none make-up.
Pierrot is proven standing on a knoll or the sting of a hill. Behind and beneath him are figures whose identities are much less easy. Seated on the donkey at left is a person in a ruff, black skullcap, and black cape, with a big nostril and a grinning, self-satisfied expression, who has been recognized because the cynical valet Crispin, a inventory comedian character from the Comédie-Française. On the decrease proper are three actors, the one closest to Pierrot sporting the crested headpiece related to Momus, god of folly. The younger man on the far proper gently guides the donkey with the rope in his left hand. He wears a wonderful salmon satin beret and matching jacket, and his fetching companion is attired in a striped shirt and inexperienced costume. These figures can’t be related to any characters from the Italian or French theaters. The person on the proper has at instances been recognized as Mezzetin, Pierrot’s guitar-playing companion, however he isn’t proven in his customary striped outfit.
Two preparatory drawings have been related to the composition. A pink and white chalk drawing in Munich’s Graphische Sammlung, dated to 1716, was used for the top of Crispin, and a research in three chalks and brown wash in a non-public assortment, dated to 1716–1717—and unseen for many years—was preparatory for the top of the actress, her eyelashes delicately delineated in each portray and drawing. As was his customized, Watteau had recourse to drawings comprised of his fashions and stored in sure volumes as supply materials, and these would possibly predate the composition he was engaged on by some years.
It has lengthy been identified that Pierrot was not referred to or mentioned in a single eighteenth-century account, though Watteau was distinctive amongst French artists of his time in having a number of biographies written by shut buddies that appeared within the many years following his demise in 1721. Nor was this monumental canvas engraved for the compendium of 144 work printed in 1734 by Jean de Jullienne, his buddy, patron, and promoter. However, with the notable exception of 1 specialist, the attribution of this work to Watteau—and its courting to 1718–1719, after he was acquired into the Académie Royale and earlier than his reckless choice to maneuver to London for a 12 months, which little question aggravated the tuberculosis that led to his demise—has been universally accepted.
It has not been potential, regardless of tenacious sleuthing, to affiliate the portray with any fee throughout Watteau’s lifetime. Its scale (and monumentality) means that Pierrot may need served as a ornament for a salon, a staircase, or a non-public theater. It’s too refined and effectively preserved to have functioned as a fairground signal or a billboard for a store or café. Nor can the portray be related to a specific actor or efficiency. Whereas not referring explicitly to this image, the connoisseur and collector Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, in his lifetime of Watteau printed in 1745, described the artist’s final days, spent on the dwelling of a well-placed buddy in Nogent-sur-Marne, a village seven miles east of Paris. Watteau was particularly keen on the good-looking younger curate of the parish, for whom he could have painted a Crucifixion on his deathbed and who, in accordance with Dezallier d’Argenville, had modeled for the comedic character of Gilles in a portray by the artist. Till 1984 the central determine in Pierrot was recognized as Gilles, and the portray was generally known as Gilles through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Gilles is first recorded within the assortment of Napoleon’s director of the Louvre, the diplomat, writer, and artist Dominique Vivant Denon, who is believed to have acquired it round 1804 for little or no cash from the store of a marchand de bric à brac on the close by place du Carrousel. A curious drawing by Denon within the Morgan Library and Museum’s assortment means that he may need recognized Watteau’s portray some years earlier. It’s a political satire that commemorates the failure in June 1795 of royalist and British troops on the Île d’Yeu in Brittany, beneath the management of the comte d’Artois and his sons, the duc d’Angoulême and the duc de Berry, to launch a counterrevolutionary offensive within the Vendée. The cowardly d’Artois returned to exile in Britain by the tip of the 12 months. In Denon’s drawing, he’s remodeled into Watteau’s Pierrot, now a quaking determine with a crown on his head and distinguished hen legs—une poule mouillée (a drenched hen), one who’s weak and feeble. (The time period stays in use at this time.)
Watteau, together with all the most important French artists of the ancien régime, had grow to be a derided, forgotten grasp by the tip of the eighteenth century. Jacques-Louis David’s college students reportedly threw pellets of bread at The Embarkation for Cythera, such was their disdain. Gilles was acquired at Denon’s posthumous sale in Could 1826 by his nephew for a derisory sum, and it was not till the center many years of the nineteenth century that the reviled artists of the Rococo skilled an intensive if considerably romantic rehabilitation. Whereas within the 1840s and 1850s the revival of the style for the artwork of the ancien régime had been related, considerably unexpectedly, with left-wing politics and republican affiliation, by the Eighties, as Francis Haskell famous, it had been totally adopted by bankers, industrialists, and “the international moneyed aristocracy.”
By far the best collector to have rehabilitated Watteau and the eighteenth-century French college was the physician and novice painter Louis La Caze, who acquired Gilles in 1838 for two,500 francs. Earlier than bequeathing his assortment of 583 work to the Louvre in 1869—the place they have been put in in a gallery created for them within the west wing of the Cour Carrée—La Caze had allowed the general public entry to his dwelling on the rue du Cherche-Midi and lent lots of his eighteenth-century French masterpieces to an exhibition on the Galerie Martinet that ran for six months in 1860. (Manet and Degas have been amongst those that visited.)
Within the present on the Louvre, Faroult included work by Watteau’s college students in addition to a bit dedicated to Pierrot’s bohemian legacy within the center many years of the nineteenth century, notably the performances of the actor and mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau on the Théâtre des Funambules on the boulevard du Temple and Nadar’s pictures of Deburau’s son, Charles, because the melancholic clown, which gained a gold medal on the Exposition Universelle in 1855. Pierrot’s varied incarnations in fin-de-siècle and twentieth-century portray, images, and filmmaking, in addition to his affect on a choice of up to date artists, constituted the exhibition’s epilogue.
The present title of Watteau’s portray—Pierrot—and the identification of its theatrical characters, notably Pierrot himself, have been established solely in 1984 by François Moureau, the literary historian and authority on the French theater within the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas Watteau is primarily celebrated for his creation of the fête galante—a brand new style in French portray that confirmed younger, superbly dressed lovers in elegant parks (accompanied by the occasional kids and canines), attired in an assortment of recent, theatrical, and historic costumes and fascinating in varied modes of courtship and seduction—from his arrival in Paris in 1702 his work was no much less influenced by the up to date theater. Characters from the commedia dell’arte had grow to be fashionable in France by way of the performs and farces initially carried out by the Comédie-Italienne. Born in Valenciennes within the north of France, Watteau got here to Paris to work for an obscure painter of decorations for the Opéra and shortly apprenticed with Claude Gillot, a way more profitable painter, draftsman, and printmaker whose specialty was scenes from the comedic theater.5 Although grasp and scholar quickly fell out, Gillot was a major affect on Watteau’s early work.
The theatrical scene in Paris in Watteau’s day was thriving, if contentious, with three main establishments having fun with royal privileges that gave them monopolies on the spoken and sung phrase: the Académie Royale de Musique, based in 1669; the Comédie-Française, based in 1680; and the Comédie-Italienne, based in 1660. All through the interval there have been additionally vibrant, seasonal truthful theaters that carried out in massive industrial areas and provided burlesque entertainments for a various viewers. The foire Saint-Germain on the Left Financial institution carried out in February and March, the foire Saint-Laurent on the Proper Financial institution in August and September, and the much less consequential foire Saint-Ovide on the place Vendôme just for the month of August. One notable innovation in these fashionable theaters was the “parade,” or teaser, during which the actors carried out temporary skits on outside balconies without spending a dime to entice folks to purchase tickets. Watteau, who owned a field of theatrical costumes during which he dressed and posed his fashions, was a eager admirer of those performances.
After placing on a play within the spring of 1697 that insulted Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic spouse, the Comédie-Italienne was summarily expelled from Paris. The troupe’s principal characters—comedian sorts comparable to Harlequin, Mezzetin, Columbine, Scaramouche, and Pierrot—have been quickly co-opted by the playwrights and impresarios of the truthful theaters, in performances that may be characterised as off-Broadway meets the Cirque de Soleil. Within the first many years of the eighteenth century the royal theaters, notably the Comédie-Française, have been vigilant in going to court docket to protect their monopoly. (In 1719 they succeeded in shutting down the fairground performances fully.) The fairground gamers weren’t permitted to carry out total performs and even communicate dialogues, they usually responded through the use of signboards for speeches and fascinating in mime, acrobatics, and dance. Their vitality and ingenuity quickly attracted among the most proficient playwrights. Satirists comparable to Alexandre Jean Baptiste Dufresny and Alain-René Lesage created vaudeville productions for them, and their repertory was additionally carried out in elite, non-public théâtres de société. They have been so successful that in July 1715 the Mercure Galante famous that each the Comédie-Française and the Opéra have been abandoned. Girl Margaret Pennyman, an English customer to Paris in August 1720, wrote in her diary:
One of the best Diversion I met with of this type [of theater] was at St Lawrence Truthful, which is stored each Yr with out St Martin’s Gate: Listed below are nice Numbers of Outlets, with all Types of Nicknacks and Curiosities, with Raffling, Gaming, and Lotteries, and abundance of Cubicles for Farces, Rope-dancing, and Tumbling, which is the perfect they’ll carry out.
Coming upon the sales space of the actor-manager François Moylin, generally known as Francisque, whose gamers Watteau could have seen carry out in London a few months earlier, Pennyman noticed that it was “so crowded, with the best Quality, that there was no Room for us.”
The inventory characters of the exiled Comédie-Italienne have been reimagined by the playwrights and performers of the truthful theaters and impressed Watteau all through his profession. An early masterpiece, the elegiac Artist’s Dream (see illustration beneath), dated to round 1710–1712, reveals the artist in a mysterious parkland, collapsing in entrance of his easel in a gesture of misery. 4 males in theatrical costume be part of arms in dance, whereas the airborne Muse of Comedy factors to a gaggle of actors from the Comédie-Italienne crowded collectively on a cloud beneath her. Tall, lanky Pierrot, sporting a rose-colored silk cap, stands at consideration on the far proper. Virtually the whole forged of Watteau’s future repertory of theatrical work is included right here.
As Judy Sund famous in a magisterial survey of Watteau’s depictions of Pierrot and the parable of the unhappy clown that they impressed, the artist “afforded Pierrot a pride of place the character did not hold in theatrical productions.”6 Watteau couldn’t have seen an precise efficiency of the Comédie-Italienne till the corporate returned to Paris in 1716; it was the truthful productions that provided inspiration for a few of his most sympathetic compositions. And from being the sidekick and butt of the scheming Harlequin, in his portrayal by the actors of the favored theater Pierrot had emerged as each a lover and musician (and is proven as such in a number of of Watteau’s work). Most notably, as François Moureau first noticed, Pierrot turned the standard-bearer of the truthful theater—“une sorte de porte-drapeau de la Foire.”
After ending Pierrot, Watteau left Paris for London and produced not less than two main works impressed by the Italian comedians during which Pierrot assumes a number one function. The Nationwide Gallery of Artwork’s Italian Comedians was painted for Richard Mead, physician-in-ordinary to King George II, and as many as sixteen drawings could also be related to it. We see Pierrot standing proudly on the middle of the corporate of fifteen actors taking their bows. Whereas the attribution to Watteau of this canvas had been questioned previously, technical examination and a considered restoration within the Nineteen Eighties established its authenticity past dispute. It has lately been proposed that Watteau painted the curtain name of a efficiency by a visiting French troupe that he may need attended in particular person. Between March and June 1720 the truthful gamers led by Francisque made their third go to to London, “ce charmant pays des Guinées.” On June 9, 1720, the celebrated Pierrot Anthony Francis Roger carried out in a profit attended by the Prince of Wales; twelve days later, on their final evening in London, Francisque’s troupe delivered Les Adieux d’Arlequin, Pierrot et Columbine. Watteau, who returned to Paris that summer time, could have been within the viewers on the King’s Theater, Haymarket, on each evenings.
A second portray that Watteau made in London, additionally entitled The Italian Comedians—acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2012—stays controversial. A big canvas with 5 figures, it reveals a fascinating, boyish Pierrot, with blond hair and ruddy cheeks, holding out his hat in his proper hand as if searching for a donation. To his left, a guitar-playing Mezzetin takes a bow. Harlequin, mustachioed and masked in black, could be seen hiding behind them. There is no such thing as a query that the superbly executed central determine of Pierrot is by Watteau. A preparatory drawing for this determine along with his outstretched arm within the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, reveals the actor, however with a pinched and mean-spirited expression fairly not like the sympathetic clown within the completed work. Infrared reflectography has confirmed that Watteau initially adopted his drawing and painted Pierrot with exactly the identical face however altered the canvas as he accomplished it. The encircling figures will not be dealt with as suavely. The faces of the 2 actors at proper are painted extra broadly—they could have stepped out of a canvas by Frans Hals. Faroult, in his dialogue of the Getty image, which he catalogs as “attributed to Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Pater and an anonymous collaborator,” expresses the hope that the “confrontation” with the Louvre’s Pierrot within the exhibition would assist resolve the problem as soon as and for all. In truth, as Alan Wintermute first proposed in 2012, seeing the work from the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork and the Getty in pretty shut proximity made it potential to substantiate that they’re each by the identical hand, undeniably Watteau’s alone.
Because the Louvre’s exhibition demonstrated, Pierrot is certainly the best of Watteau’s theatrical work. It’s distinguished by its scale, by its maestria, by the sympathy with which every character—together with the donkey—is portrayed, and by the sweetness and youthful ardor of its figures. As famous, among the many trio at proper solely the wide-eyed man closest to Pierrot could be related to a personality from the comedian theater. Though we can not see if he’s holding Momus’s tambourine and marotte—a stick to a jester’s head—his crested headwear confirms the designation. The gorgeous couple subsequent to him are possible stand-ins for lovers who work together onstage with the comedian sorts.
However what of the donkey, along with his dainty pink bow and a tear falling from his proper eye? In medieval imagery, an untrue partner may be obliged to mount a donkey and journey backward as punishment, which is clearly not the case right here. “To wash the head of a donkey, one wastes soap and water” was an Italian proverb, courting to the late fifteenth century, advising in opposition to investing an excessive amount of time in futile endeavors. (It’s just like the extra brutal English phrase “flogging a dead horse.”) A French iteration offered the title of a parade carried out in 1716 within the Justice of the Peace Thomas-Simon Gueullette’s non-public theater at Choisy-le-Roi, entitled L’Éducation de Gille ou A laver la tête d’un âne on perd sa lessive, demonstrating the challenges of attempting to enhance the conduct of a silly servant. Even nearer in time to the gestation of Pierrot, in 1718 the unlicensed troupe managed by Louis and Marie Gauthier Saint-Edme had launched its efficiency of Lesage’s Château des Lutins on the foire Saint-Germain with the spectacle of a poor donkey sliding down a rope on a makeshift gurney to draw audiences. This was lampooned in a satirical music, “L’Âne de la foire” (The Donkey on the Truthful): “Long ago Paris admired/Corneille, Racine, Molière;/Lully, in his smallest opera/Knew how to please the town,/These great men of the past/Are now replaced by a donkey.”
Whereas Watteau’s inclusion of the donkey would possibly allude to a latest occasion at one of many fashionable gala’s, within the exhibition catalog Faroult argues that the composition as an entire could be understood as a commentary on the “querelle des théâtres”—the quarrel of the theaters—that got here to a head in 1718–1719. Having loved a “glorious season” in 1718, the truthful theater corporations have been attacked the next 12 months by judicial proceedings that silenced them all through 1719. The success of Voltaire’s Oedipe spurred the revival of the Comédie-Française, and the lately returned Comédie-Italienne started to incorporate among the truthful’s characters in its productions. Can Watteau’s portray be learn as a name for amity and reconciliation amongst these warring corporations? If, as has been established, Pierrot is the first consultant of the truthful theater, Faroult’s argument rests on the identification of the smiling determine at left as Crispin. Crispin wouldn’t have appeared onstage with comedian gamers from the truthful, though Watteau did embrace him in a small portray on panel, Pierrot, Harlequin and Scapin, in Waddesdon Manor, dated to round 1717–1718.
Taking the argument a step additional, Faroult additionally proposes that Crispin must be learn as a self-portrait of Watteau: he associates the determine’s smiling options with a print of a misplaced drawing exhibiting the artist “with drapery around his head and a laughing physiognomy.” Ingenious although this interpretation is, there are issues with it. It’s not in any respect clear that the person within the ruff collar in Pierrot shares Watteau’s options.7 Furthermore, and extra consequentially, can the donkey-riding protagonist be recognized as Crispin with absolute certainty? The determine who enters from stage proper within the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s French Comedians, proven sporting a stiff black cap, a large starched collar, knee-length boots, and a sword, is indisputably Crispin, as is the closely jowled man at far proper in Love on the French Theater in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. (They’re identically attired.) The smiling man on the donkey, nonetheless, along with his skullcap and ruff, doesn’t altogether match the invoice, and in earlier discussions he has been described because the pedantic Physician from Bologna, or as Scapin, the escape artist—each inventory characters from the commedia dell’arte.8
However, Faroult’s method has appreciable benefit in alerting us to the allegorical potentialities of Watteau’s composition and the the Aristocracy of its aspiration and conception—totally in step with the artist’s standing as a historical past painter of the Académie Royale. There may be an all-embracing humanity, group, and optimism in Watteau’s remedy of those youthful figures, with their lives and loves nonetheless totally forward of them. Maybe the final phrase must be left to the artist Peter Doig, whom Faroult discusses on the shut of his catalog. Noting that Gilles is proven “somewhat self-conscious and alone,” Doig says that “the expression on Gilles’ face is one of the most sympathetic in all painting…and the body language is also extremely nuanced, suggesting a certain vulnerability without being overt as to what exactly.”
