Antoine Watteau – Biography of Antoine Watteau

Jean Antoine Watteau He was born on October 10, 1684 into a modest family in the Flemish town of Valenciennes, now in northern France. It is believed that he spent his formative years under the direction of both the religious painter Jacques Albert Gérin and the sculptor Antoine Joseph Pater.

In 1702 Watteau He came to Paris, finding employment with a picture dealer at Pont Notre-Dame specializing in the production of portraits and religious paintings. Around 1705 he entered the studio of Claude Gillot, a draftsman, printmaker and painter. Gillot was an influential and idiosyncratic teacher who passed on to him the satirical fantasy that characterized his own specialized representations of theater scenes, bacchanalia, and decorative designs. Watteau he also absorbed from Gillot the formal and technical elements that made up his own style: energetic and confident work of drawing, vigorous figures, and a penchant for expressive themes and characters. In 1708 Watteau He entered the workshop of the ornamental painter Claude Audran III, helping him create interior decorations for private and royal residences.

In 1709 he received second prize in the annual competition of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture for the Prix de Rome for his work Abigail Who Brings Food to David. Discouraged by this second position and the conditions of his employment with Audran, Watteau returned to Valenciennes, having financed his return home by selling his painting for £ 60 Return from the Campaign, to the distributor Pierre Sirois.

As a garrison town, Valenciennes provided inspiration for distinctive military scenes, characterized by an attention to everyday aspects of country life, a genre that Watteau profited profitably after his return to Paris, sometime in 1710. He also applied his ineffable drawing to engraving, producing an album of fashionable etchings, Figures by modes, circa 1709 to 1713. Such production reflected his awareness and dependence on the prevailing tastes of elite private clients, a class of patrons personified by Pierre Crozat, the immensely wealthy banker to the French monarch. Crozat soon became the most important and devoted patron of Watteau.

Watteau lived for a time in the Parisian mansion of Crozat, where he not only painted a number of important station decorations, including Ceres (summer), but also made print copies of important Italian masterpieces and drawings from Crozat’s vast collection. Through Crozat, he became intimately involved with Venetian painting, a tradition very much in vogue in France during the Regency period.

Despite a production largely outside the mainstream of academic art, Watteau it remained within the orbit of the Académie. In 1712 he was approved by the Académie, due to the favorable evaluation given to his work Les Jaloux. This painting, known only through engraving, depicted mixed figures in a forest clearing, a fusion of landscapes and costumed characters that exemplified his hybrid painting style. The peculiarity of his productions, in turn led the Académie to break the long tradition by allowing the artist to choose the subject of painting required for full admission to the Académie. Five years passed before Watteau presented, as his reception work on August 28, 1717, the famous Peregrination to Cythera, an image that became the example of the recently invented genre of the gallant party. As representations of graceful figures in park settings dedicated to loving interaction, fêtes galantes dominated a number of contemporary artistic precedents and cultural trends: garden scenes featuring figures from earlier masters such as Sir Pieter Paul Rubens, Venetian color, and the fledgling debauchery of the regency period.

However, Watteau He far exceeded the sum of this composite lineage, using undefined settings and the suggestive psychology of his figures to imbue his gallant parties with a mysterious power. Such was the seductive novelty of the fête galante that the Académie made an exception by establishing it as a new category, to welcome Watteau as a full member.

But Watteau He soon distanced himself from the Académie, finding his patrons among a small circle of private admirers rather than in the official world of state and church. To seek greater commercial success, in 1720 he traveled to London, where he hoped to find another audience for his talents. At the time he was suffering from what is believed to be tuberculosis, and it is possible that he also intended to consult with infectious disease specialist Dr. Richard Mead, for whom he painted several important pictures, including The Italian Comedians.

Upon his return to Paris in 1721, Watteau He resided for a time with distributor Edme François Gersaint, painting the famous Shop Sign for the latter’s premises. Eventually he moved on his own to Nogent-sur-Marne, briefly renewing his friendship with his former student Jean Baptiste Pater, whom he instructed during his last months of life.

Antoine Watteau died at the age of thirty-seven on July 18, 1721.