Jean Antoine Watteau

Jean-Antoine Watteau (Valenciennes 1684-1721 Nogent-sur-Marne) Two studies of a young child standing, and another of a young girl seated red, black and white chalk 9¾ x 12 5/8 in. (24.8 x 32 cm.) Grand Duke Hesse-Nassau (on loan to the Landesmuseum, Darmstadt). W. Hanhart (according to Parker and Mathey). Anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 15 December 1954, lot 120. Minnie Cassatt, Philadelphia; by descent to the present owner. K.T. Parker and J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau, catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, Paris, 1957, II, no. 718, illus. D. Posner, Antoine Watteau, London, 1984, pp. 237, 288, note 19. M.M. Grasselli, The drawings of Antoine Watteau, stylistic development and problems of chronology, unpubl. Ph.D, Cambridge, Harvard University, 1987, pp. 216, 290, note 72. M.M. Grasselli, 'News' in The Watteau Society Bulletin, III, 1994, p. 54. P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Antoine Watteau, 1648-1721, catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan, 1997, II, no. 508. Dated to circa 1716-1717 by Rosenberg and Prat this sheet of two studies of a child standing, and another of a seated girl, perhaps a few years older is related to at least four published works by Watteau, and a recently rediscovered painting on copper which will be sold in these rooms, 30 January 2013 (lot 37). It is utterly characteristic of the artist in several respects -- in its handling of trois crayons, in its arrangement of figures on the page, and in their adaptation and inclusion in multiple painted compositions. Among 18th Century artists, Watteau is the unsurpassed master of the trois crayons drawing. This technique derived from Rubens in the 17th Century but was tranformed by later French artists such as Charles de la Fosse and ultimately reached its zenith with Watteau. In the present sheet, red chalk predominates while black is used in the hair of all three figures, but as accents only on the figures at the right and left. The white chalk is used for all three figure to highlight both their faces and clothing. In his handling of the red chalk alone, the diversity of technique is extraordinary. Short, jagged strokes and softer passages of hatching are combined to evoke the crisp folds of fabric. In contrast, an undulating line around the neck of the seated girl enhanced by a bit of white perfectly suggests the translucency and delicacy of her ruffled collar. It is difficult, and indeed was unimportant to Watteau for the purpose of the drawing, to tell whether the two children at the left are boys or girls. Again, this is typical of Watteau's approach to these figures where the precise identity or use of them was less important than the pose he was trying to capture at that moment. As one of his 18th Century biographers, the Comte de Caylus noted: 'The exercise of drawing had infinite charms for him and although sometimes the figure on which he happened to be at work was not a study undertaken with any particular purpose in view, he had the greatest imaginable difficulty in tearing himself away from it...in general he drew without a purpose...It was his habit to do his drawings in a bound book, so that he always had a large number of them that were readily available. He possessed cavalier's and comedian's costumes in which he dressed up such persons as he could find, of either sex, who were capable of posing adequately, and whom he drew in such attitudes as nature dictated...When he took his fancy to paint a picture, he resorted to his collection of studies, choosing such figures as suited him for the moment. These he usually grouped so as to accord with a landscape background that he had already conceived or prepared.' The figures in this drawing appear with some modifications in at least five painted works by Watteau. The central figure with the child in three quarter view was used most frequently, appearing in L'accordée de village, Assemblée galante (fig. 1) and Entretiens amoureux (Recueil Jullienne, D.V. 116; D.V. 139 and D.V. 124). The child at the far left of the sheet appears, very definitely as a girl and wielding a Harlequin's sword which is only suggested in the drawing, in the painting Heureux âge! âge d'or.. (Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; Watteau (1684-1721), exhib. cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art and elsewhere, 1984, pp. 365-67, no. 50). Two of the children appear in a small painting on copper entitled La Déclaration which is being sold in these rooms on 30 January 2013 (lot 37). In this painting, as in the three others, the young child from the center of the drawing stares out at the viewer, her gaze all the more arresting because she is the only figure facing us. Watteau has then taken the seated girl in the right side of the drawing and reversed her pose, including her face which instead of facing three-quarter view towards the viewer, now faces almost in profile towards the amorous couple behind her. Here Watteau's inventiveness is on full display -- having taken two seemingly unconnected figure studies from one drawing -- he has reconceived them as a coherent assembly in La Déclaration.

Lot Description Antoine Watteau (Valenciennes 1684-1721 Nogent-sur-Marne) La Déclaration inscribed in ink 'A. Watteau' (on the reverse of the copper) oil on copper 8½ x 6¾ in. (21.9 x 16.4 cm.) Provenance Collet Collection, Chevalier de l'ordre de Saint-Michel, Paris; his sale, 14-23 May 1787, lot 94 ('L'intérieur d'un jardin où l'on voit par le dos un jeune homme, genou en terre aux pieds d'une jeune fille; près d'eux, quatre enfants sont groupés dans des attitudes, Cuivre. H. 7 p.7 l., L. 5 p. 10 l'). Robert de Saint-Victor, Conseiller au Parlement, Président de la Chambre des Comptes de Rouen, Paris; sale, 26 November 1822-7 January 1823, lot 569 (Un berger à genoux aux pieds d'une bergère. Près d'eux trois enfants jouants, l'un caressant un chien. Cuivre. H. 8 p. L. 6 p.). Samuel Rogers, London; Christie's, London, 3 May 1856, lot 676, as 'A lady and gentleman and a group of four children in a landscape - small' (to Webb). Webb collection, London. Lord Carrington, London; Christie's, London, 9 May 1930, lot 18, as 'Antoine Watteau. oil on copper, 8 x 6 inches', (to Bernard). Private collection, France. Private collection, Belgium. Pre-Lot Text PROPERTY OF A EUROPEAN COLLECTOR Literature E. de Goncourt, L'Oeuvre Peint, Dessiné et Gravé d'Antoine Watteau, Paris, 1875, pp. 159, 161. J. Ingamells, The Hertford Mawson Letters, 1981, p. 75. M. Roland Michel, Watteau, Paris, 1984, p. 299. S. Whittingham, 'Watteau and 'Watteaus' in Britain c. 1780-1851', in F. Moureau & M. Morgan Grasselli, Antoine Watteau (1684-1721): The Painter, His Age and His Legend, Paris, 1987, p. 272. View Lot Notes › This beautiful little copper appeared in several important collections in the 18th and 19th centuries, but has been unknown to recent scholars and missing from the modern scholarly literature on the artist. Because of its copper support, small size and striking subject matter, it is easily identified in the Collet Collection sale of 1787, in the 1822 sale of the paintings of Robert de Saint-Victor, and in the 1856 auction of the celebrated English collector Samuel Rogers, one of five paintings by Watteau in Roger's possession at the time of his death. The painting depicts a garden landscape with a kneeling man, seen from behind, who pleads for the attention of a seated young woman; near them, variously standing and seated are four children and a dog. The two groups of figures -- the couple, and the children -- derive from the larger, multi-figural fête galante known as the Assemblée galante (it comprised fourteen figures, measured 37 x 51.6 cm. and was executed on canvas; DV.139; CR.171), a painting that has been lost since the 18th century, but which was originally owned by the comtesse de Verrue and whose composition is known from the 1731 engraving of the painting made by J.-Ph. Le Bas for the Recueil Jullienne. It was not uncommon for Watteau to recycle motifs from one painting to another: although his friend and biographer, the comte de Caylus, complained that Watteau "repeated, on many occasions, the same figures without being aware of it", the practice was surely not the result of carelessness; rather, the artist was happy to exploit, in new contexts, figures that he found especially expressive. For example, he created a small-scale painting called Bon Voyage (lost; known from Benoit Audran's 1727 engraving, DV.35) by incorporating the principal couple from the far right-side of The Embarkation to Cythera (Louvre, Paris) with the boat and sea-bound pilgrims from its left side, and eliminating everything in between. In Pour nous prouver que cette belle, a panel painting in the Wallace Collection, London (CR.154), Watteau created a 'condensed' version of Prelude to a Concert (CR.179), an earlier, complex multi-figural fête galante in Potsdam, lifting the figures of a woman reading a musical score and a standing lute player from the German painting and compressing them into the tiny London picture, adding three new figures around them, and in so doing creating a new composition, as Christoph Vogtherr has recently observed (see C.M. Vogtherr, Watteau in the Wallace Collection, London, 2011, pp. 97-103). In the same fashion, La Déclaration compresses two distinct figural groups -- the adult couple and the playing children -- from different sections of an ambitious and complex composition, creating in the process a new and more intimate cabinet picture with its own mood and meaning. La Déclaration is executed on copper, a support Watteau used occasionally throughout his career for small pictures (for example, Les fatigues de guerre and Les dèlassements de la guerre, in The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (CR.97 & 96); the two versions of the pair L'Avanturière and L'Enchanteur in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Troyes (CR.89 & 88) and Brodick Castle, Isle of Arran). La Déclaration is rapidly and thinly painted on a very lightly prepared surface, which is characteristic of the artist's paintings on metal. Interestingly, La Déclaration is painted on an engraver's discarded copper plate: if one examines the reverse, the incised lines of a Madonna are readily evident (fig. 1). The engraving has not been identified, but it is almost certainly not the work of Watteau himself; rather it appears to be an anonymous French engraver's plate from around 1700 that Watteau thriftily turned to good use. This was common practice for the artist: the paintings L'Accord parfait (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; CR.196) and La Sérénade Italienne (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; CR.136) were executed on old wooden coach doors; the drawing The Italian Troop (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin) was sketched on the verso of a sheet of paper that has a proof state of one of Watteau's own etchings printed on the recto. Two drawings survive for figures in the painting: a study for the kneeling lover is in the Louvre, Paris (RP.504); and a wonderful trois crayons sketch for the standing child who looks out at us, which will be sold in these rooms, 31 January 2013, lot 128 (fig. 2). Both of these drawings have been dated circa 1716-1717 by Rosenberg and Prat. La Déclaration itself seems, based on the style of its execution, to have been painted around 1718; that it was not engraved for the Recueil Jullienne was no doubt due to its similarities to the Assemblée galante. La Déclaration will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Watteau's paintings by Alan Wintermute currently in preparation.

Jean Antoine Watteau (Valenciennes 1684-1721 Nogent-sur-Marne) A seated lady holding a fan red and black chalk on paper, a counterproof 25 x 18cm (9 13/16 x 7 1/16in). PROVENANCE: Sir Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill The Earls of Strathmore and Kinghorne Miss Joy Marine Betty Lyon (1902-1956), Keltie Castle, Dunning, Perthshire, and Goring Hall, West Sussex Elizabeth Carnegy-Arbuthnot (d. 1986), Hampton Court Lodge Laura Nepean-Gubbins (d.1995), London, and thence by descent to the present owner LITERATURE: K.T. Parker and J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau 1684-1721, Oeuvre Dessiné (Paris, 1957), vol. II, no. 549, p. 309 (as in the Collection of Miss Lyon) P. Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Antonine Watteau 1684-1721, Catalogue raisonné des dessins (Milan, 1996), vol. II, no. 469, p.782 (as unseen)

DescEN Watteau, Jean Antoine nach After Jean Antoine Watteau 19th C. Park scenery. Oil on panel. Unsigned. Inscribed lower right "d'ap. Watteau". Minor retouching. 19. Jh. Galante Szene im Park. Ol/Holz. In sommerlicher Parklandschaft an einem See Figurengruppe mit Gitarrenspieler. Unsign. U.r. bez. "d'ap. Watteau". Min. Retuschen. H. 45,5, B. 37 cm.

Jean-Antoine Watteau (Valenciennes 1684-1721 Nogent-sur-Marne, near Paris) The Union of Comedy and Music oil on canvas 25½ x 21¼ in. (64.7 x 54 cm.) Daniel Saint (1778-1847), Paris; his sale, Hôtel des Ventes, Paris, 4-7 May 1846, lot 66 (500 francs). Paul Barroilhet (1810-1871), Paris; his sale, Hôtel des Ventes Mobilières, Paris, 10 March 1856, lot 68 (4000 francs). 2nd Barroilhet sale, Hôtel des Ventes Mobilières, Paris, 2-3 April 1860, lot 130 (withdrawn). 3rd Barroilhet sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 15-16 March, 1872, lot 20 (2140 francs). Eugène Féral, by 1875. Henri Michel-Lévy, Paris; his sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 12-13 May 1919, lot 29 (to Hoven). Hoven Collection; (+), Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 21 April 1921, lot 25. with Wildenstein, New York, until 2005. Private collection, France. PROPERTY FROM A FRENCH AMERICAN PRIVATE COLLECTION P. Hédouin, 'Watteau: catalogue de son oeuvre', L'Artiste, 30 November 1845, p. 80, no. 136. W. Bürger, 'Exposition de tableaux de l'école française ancienne, tirés de collections d'amateurs', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 15 November 1860, VIII, pp. 232-233. E. de Goncourt, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre d'Antoine Watteau, Paris, 1875, p. 63, no. 63. E. and J. de Goncourt, L'Art du dix-huitième siècle , 3rd ed., Paris, 1880, I, p. 56. P. Mantz, Antoine Watteau, Paris, 1892, p. 28. V. Josz, Antoine Watteau, Paris, n.d., p. 86, note 2. L. de Fourcaud, 'Antoine Watteau: peintre d'arabesques', Revue de l'Art Ancien et Moderne, 1909, XXV, pp. 57, 133-35. E. Pilon, Watteau et son école, Paris, 1912, pp. 130-31. L. Réau, 'Watteau', in les Peintres français du XVIIIe siècle, ed. L. Dimier, Paris and Brussels, 1928, I, P. 31, no. 24. E. Dacier and A. Vuaflart, Jean de Jullienne et les graveurs de Watteau au XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1929, I, pp. 61-63, 260, no. 39; 1922, II, p. 33; 1922, III, p. 24, no. 39, illus. IV, 1921, pl. 39 (Moyreau engraving). G. Barker, Antoine Watteau, London, 1939, p. 184. G. Wildenstein, French XVIIIth Century Paintings, New York, 1948, n.p., no. 55. H. Adhémar and R. Huyghe, Watteau: sa vie, son oeuvre, Paris, 1950, pp. 194, 211-212, no. 91, pl. 43. K.T. Parker and J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau, catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, Paris, 1957, I, p. 20, cited under no. 136. J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau: peintures réapparues identification par les dessins, Paris, 1959, p. 66. A.-P. de Mirimonde, 'Statues et emblèmes dans l'oeuvre d'Antoine Watteau', La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France (La Revue des Arts), 1962, XII, no. 1, p. 20. G. Macchia and E.C. Montagni, L'Opera completa di Watteau, Milan, 1968, p. 107, no. 123. P. Rosenberg and E. Camesasca, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Watteau, Paris, 1970, p. 107, no. 123. J. Ferré et al., Watteau, Madrid, 1972, I, p. 114; IV, pp. 1007, 1119, 1130; III, p. 1058, fig. 1018 (detail of Moyreau engraving). Y. Boerlin-Brodbeck, Antoine Watteau und das Theater, Basel, 1973, pp. 167-8. M. Eidelberg, Watteau's Drawings: Their Use and Significance, New York and London, 1977, p. 259, note 59. A.-P. de Mirimonde, L'Iconographie musicale sous les rois Bourbons: la musique dans les arts plastiques (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), Paris, 1977, II, p. 24, note 31, pl. VIII, fig. 12 (Moyreau engraving). Frankfurt am Main, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Jean-Anoine Watteau: Einschiffung nach Cythera, 1982, p. 96. M. Roland Michel, Watteau, un artiste au XVIIIe siècle, London and Paris, 1984, p. 155. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, and elsewhere, Watteau, 1684-1721, 1984-1985, p. 450, cited under no. P73 (entry by P. Rosenberg), also cited in essay by F. Moureau, 'Watteau in His Time', p. 489, fig. 18 (Moyreau engraving). R. Tomlinson, 'Fête galante et/ou foraine? Watteau et le théâtre', in F. Moureau and M.M. Grasseli, eds., Antoine Watteau (1684-1721): le peintre, son temps et sa légende, Paris and Geneva, 1987, p. 210. P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721: catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan 1996, I, p. 142, cited under no. 90. M. Eidelberg, 'Letter: Watteau at Chicago', Burlington Magazine, April 1998, CXL, p. 269. R. Temperini, Watteau (trans. From the French by M. Martini), Milan, 2002, p. 143, no. 47. G. Glorieux, À l'Enseigne de Gersaint: Edme-François Gersaint, marchand d'art sur le Pont Notre-Dame (1694-1750), Mayenne, 2002, p. 195, 200, fig. 50 (Moyreau engraving). Paris, Galerie Martinet, Tableaux et dessins de l'école française, principalement du XVIIIe siècle, tires de collections d'amateurs, 1860, no. 429. Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Le Théâtre à Paris (XVII-XVIIIe siècles), 19 March-4 May 1929, no. 81. New York, The New School for Social Research, Loan Exhibition of Paintings, 3-17 March 1946, no. 19. New York, Wildenstein, French Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, 21 January-21 February 1948, no. 47. Kansas City, Missouri, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, The Century of Mozart, 15 January-4 March 1956, no. 104. Zurich, Kunsthaus, Unbekannte Schönheit: Bedeutende Werke aus fünf Jahrhunderten, 9 June-31 July 1956, no. 275. London, Royal Academy of Arts, France in the Eighteenth Century, 6 January-3 March 1968, no. 729, fig. 57. Tokyo, Wildenstein, Masterpieces of European Paintings, 18 May-19 June 1992, no. 2. New York, Wildenstein, The Arts of France, from François Ier to Napoléon Ier, 26 October 2005-6 January 2006, no. 44 (entry by J. Baillio). New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Watteau, Music, and Theater, 2009, no. 4 (entry by K. Baetjer). Jean Moyreau Even for Watteau, that most ambiguous of artists, The Union of Comedy and Music is an unusually elliptical work, one that is unique in his oeuvre. It was engraved in reverse by Jean Moyreau for the Recueil Jullienne and its publication was announced in the Mercure de France in March 1730. The print provides the painting's title and a brief caption explaining that Comedy and Music are represented in the guise of their Muses, accompanied by their arms and attributes. The owner of the painting is not given. At the center of the composition, a convex oval escutcheon is magically suspended against the sky, above a grassy landscape that curves to suggest the contour of the earth itself. Surrounded by an elaborate gilded frame, the black background of the shield is ornamented with a mask of comedy and old-fashioned musical notations rendered in gold. Surmounting the escutcheon is the head of either Crispin or Scapin, the scheming valets in black hats and white ruffs who were stock characters in the Comédie Française, and suspended above the whole is a crown composed or two intertwined laurel wreaths, a crown being a traditional reward of the conqueror and laurel signifying artistic glory. Behind the shield is a diagonal cross composed of a Harlequin's slapstick and a transverse flute, and around it floats an elaborate garland of musical scores, fool's heads, and various musical instruments -- including a violin, a guitar, a lute, a viola, a French horn, tambourines and pan pipes. From a pink ribbon tied to the bottom of the escutcheon hangs a silver medallion bearing the image of two standing figures; according to Joseph Baillio, they might be Apollo and a muse. On either side of this remarkable floating apparition stands a beautiful, semi-clad female figure. On the left is Thalia, Muse of Comedy and Pastoral Poetry, who intently examines a rather grotesque actor's mask, the traditional attribute that she holds before her. Crowned with ivy and breasts exposed, Thalia wears a pink, vaguely antique costume with buskins decorated with lions' heads. On the right, Music is embodied either by Euterpe, Muse of Music and Lyric Poetry, or possibly Terpsichore, Muse of Dance and Song; both carry musical instruments and have their hair garlanded with flowers. Watteau's palette of slate blues, pearl gray and pale rose is exceptionally lovely and refined, and throughout the composition are rough traces of underdrawing evident to the naked eye. (Infrared reflectography, which has proven very useful in revealing the changes in design made by the artist in other paintings, has not yet been performed on the present work.) Although every element of this unusual composition is rendered with naturalistic, three-dimensional exactitude -- the softly fleshed women, their shimmering, silken drapery, the string instruments and darkened sky just beginning to glow with the break of dawn -- its subject matter exists in the realm of symbolism, and can only be understood, to the degree that viewers today can understand it, by interpreting it allegorically. Over the years, various readings of the painting's possible meanings have been offered, some of them excessively ornate and obscure. François Moureau has offered the most convincing explication of Watteau's subject matter, made all the more satisfactory by its comparative simplicity. He sees The Union of Comedy and Music as an allegory of the alliance of the two separate and competing theatrical establishments, the Comédie Française and the Opéra -- a dream that these official stages in Paris could work together harmoniously -- in which Watteau aims "a certain derisive wit at the 'serious' genres." Contemporary viewers of the painting, aware of the increasing "lack of interest on the part of the fashionable public for tragedies and the tragic theatre," would have interpreted its allegorical allusions in the light of this popular shift in taste. Moureau acknowledges, however, that layers of meaning in a complex painting such as this are most likely permanently lost to us. "Any analysis of the finer perceptions in the 'comic subjects' of Watteau presupposes a profound acquaintance with the contemporary theatrical world in which he and his contemporaries lived naturally. What appears to us today as 'constructions' with hidden meanings were as easily interpreted by the fashionable world of his time as was a fable by a historical painter." Theories abound that Watteau's painting was designed as a signboard for a theatre or a dealer in musical instruments, or as a model for a stage curtain. It is sufficiently anomalous to suggest that it may have been the result of a specific, now untraced, commission. The artist's connections to the theatre were deep and of long standing, and so the painting might well have been made at the request of one of the numerous actors, musicians, or other men (and women) of the theatre with whom Watteau was acquainted. In style and handling it appears to somewhat predate the Crozat Seasons which are documented as having been executed in 1717, and it might be placed around 1715, if not slightly earlier. Whatever the allusions Watteau was making in The Union of Comedy and Music to the politics of the official theatres in Régence Paris, his painting still fascinates and moves us as an affectionate tribute to the triumph of the noble theatrical arts, which seem in Watteau's painting to stand alone atop the breaking dawn of a new world. At a time when actors were regarded with suspicion and traveling theatrical troupes often operated one step ahead of the law, Watteau's respect for their art and their commitment to it is both admirable and bracing. To be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Watteau's paintings by Alan Wintermute.