Antoine Watteau

Antoine Watteau
Rosalba Carriera, CC BY-SA 4.0

The creator of the fête galante.

Watteau painted dreamy garden parties with elegantly dressed couples and figures from the theatre. He died young but set the tone of the Rococo.

Antoine Watteau was born in October 1684 in Valenciennes, a town that had become French only a few years earlier. His father was a roofer. Around 1702 Antoine moved to Paris, where at first he lived in poverty, copying religious pictures in series for a dealer. He then found work with Claude Gillot, who painted scenes from the theatre, especially the Italian commedia dell’arte. After that he worked for the decorative painter Claude Audran, who was keeper of the Luxembourg Palace. There Watteau was able to study Rubens's great cycle on Marie de' Medici.

In 1712 he was accepted as a candidate at the Royal Academy of Painting. His reception piece, The Embarkation for Cythera, was not completed until 1717 and is now in the Louvre. It shows elegantly dressed couples on their way to or from the island of the goddess of love, in a golden, hazy landscape. The Academy had no category that fitted, so it created a new one: the fête galante, the gallant party. A second version is in Berlin.

Watteau painted dreamy garden parties where people court one another, play music and converse. Behind the elegance there is often a melancholy, as if happiness were about to vanish. His Pierrot in the Louvre, formerly called Gilles, stands alone and motionless in his white costume before the viewer. His drawings, often made in red, black and white chalk, are greatly admired. The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm owns his painting The Love Lesson.

Watteau suffered from tuberculosis. He travelled to London in 1719–20, possibly to seek medical treatment. Back in Paris in 1720 he painted a large shop sign for his friend, the art dealer Gersaint, showing customers looking at art in a shop. It is now in Berlin. He died in 1721 in Nogent-sur-Marne outside Paris, only 36 years old.

Watteau gave the Rococo its tone of lightness, elegance and melancholy. Followers such as Jean-Baptiste Pater and Nicolas Lancret took up his subjects, and later he influenced Boucher and Fragonard.