Jean Antoine Watteau

Painted for the King's cabinet, Château de la Muette, circa 1708-1716;
Possibly anonymous sale, Paris 28-29 April 1829, lots 71 and 72 (as lot 71, Antoine Watteau, Composition de deux figures de Chinois, dont l'un joue de la vielle and lot 72, Jeune fille assise dans un jardin; près d'elle est un jeune garcon; Pendant du precedent);
Chinese Musician only: Possibly Bezançon de Wagner;
Chinese Musician only: Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, 11 January 1996, lot 151;
Chinese Woman only: Private collection, Switzerland, 2009; acquired through Sotheby's private treaty sale, November 2009.

New Orleans, New Orleans Museum of Art, In the Eye of the Beholder: Northern Baroque Paintings from the Collection of Henry H. Weldon, 1997, no. 68 (Chinese Musician only);
Brussels, Palais de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). La Leçon de musique, 8 February - 12 May 2013, nos. 125 and 126;
Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, De Watteau à Fragonard, Les fêtes galantes, 14 March - 21 July, 2014, nos. 10 and 11.

E. de Goncourt, Catalogue raisonné de l'oeuvre peint, dessiné et gravé d'Antoine Watteau, Paris 1875, p. 194, cat. nos. 227 and 228;
E. Dacier and A. Vuaflart, Jean de Julienne et les graveurs de Watteau, 1921-1922, cat. nos. 232 and 233 (for the engravings after the paintings);
H. Adhémar and R. Huyghe, Watteau, sa vie — son oeuvre, Paris 1950, pp. 203-204, under cat. no. 18 (lost decorations for the Chateau de la Muette; engraving after Chinese Musician reproduced p. 96);
F. Gétreau, "Watteau et sa generation: contribution à la chronologie et à l'identification de deux instruments," in Imago Musicae, 1987, pp. 303, 307 (Chinese Musician only);
P. Stein, "Boucher's chinoiseries: some new sources," in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 138, September 1996, p. 599, note 8 (Chinese Musician only);
M. Eidelberg and S. Gopin, "Watteau's Chinoiseries at La Muette," in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 130, July/August 1997, p. 26, reproduced fig. 14 (Chinese Musician only; as a copy after the engraving);
N.T. Minty, the Eye of the Beholder: Northern Baroque Paintings from the Collection of Henry H. Weldon, exhibition catalogue, New Orleans 1997, pp. 173-175, reproduced;
M. Roland-Michel, in The Age of Watteau, Chardin and Fragonard. Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, exhibition catalogue, Ottawa 2003, pp. 115-116, reproduced fig. 77 (Chinese Musician only);
K. Scott, "Playing Games with Otherness: Watteau's Chinese Cabinet at the Chateau de La Muette," in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 66, 2003, pp.196-197, reproduced fig. 3 (Chinese Musician only; as Attributed to Watteau);
G. Glorieux, Watteau, Paris 2011, pp. 56-58, reproduced p. 57 (Chinese Musician only; as possibly a modello);
N.P. Lallement, in Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). La Leçon de musique, exhibition catalogue, Brussels 2013, pp. 207-208, cat. no. 125 and 126, reproduced;
M.T. Holmes, in De Watteau à Fragonard, Les fêtes galantes, exhibition catalogue, Paris 2014, pp. 58-59,209, cat. nos. 10 and 11, reproduced p. 59 (as circa 1708).

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This pair of pictures has not been recently restored. Both canvases have been relined. The paint layers are more or less clean. In the composition "Chinese Woman of Kouei Tchéou", there are hardly any retouches, including to the spandrels, although there are a few retouches around the extreme edges. The composition "Chinese Musician" shows a lot of small retouches in the upper sky, but none to the figures or landscape. It is recommended that the surfaces be lightly cleaned and freshly varnished.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

These small, delightful paintings are the only known surviving works that formed part of a decorative scheme executed by Watteau for a small room in the Château de la Muette, a 16^th century hunting lodge on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne.  Until the reappearance of these two paintings, Chinese Musician in 1996 and Chinese Woman in 2009 (see Provenance), the designs for the château were known only from a series of thirty prints advertised for sale in the Mercure de France in 1731 and subsequently published in the Recueil Jullienne in 1734.  They were described as Diverse Figures, Chinoises et Tartares, Peintes par Watteau, Peintre du Roy…Tirées du Cabinet de sa Majesté, Au Chauteau de la Meute.  The engravers included François Boucher, Edme Jeaurat and Michel-Guillaume Aubert, who engraved the present two compositions.  Though the legends on the prints stated that they were “drawn from the collection of the King at La Muette,” no trace of the paintings or the commission is found in royal records or archives.¹  Recent scholarship has suggested that the scheme did not, in fact, originate with Louis XV, but more likely with one of the château’s former tenants, Joseph-Jean-Baptiste Fleuriau d’Armenonville, who resided at the chateau from 1705-1716.²  Under  Louis XIII and Louis XIV, the château was a perquisite to the office of Capitainerie de la Varenne du Louvre (Master of the Hunt of the Bois de Boulogne)  which, from 1705, was assumed by Fleuriau d’Armenonville.  He and his wife, Jeanne Gilbert, shared a passion for exotic, imported wares and an inventory of items drawn up following the death of Gilbert in 1716 indicates that La Muette had been filled to the brim with Chinese and Japanese porcelains, screens, lacquered furniture, Turkish carpets and the like.  Though circumstantial, this predilection for le goût oriental adds credence to the theory that it was Fleuriau d’Armenonville who originally commissioned Watteau to paint the cabinet in La Muette.  After Fleuriau d’Armenonville, the château became the home of the Duchesse de Berry, daughter of the Duc d'Orléans, Regent of France and was eventually used by Louis XV.  In Dezailler d’Argenville’s description of the château in 1762, he makes no mention of the Watteau paintings, so it appears that their existence there was fairly short-lived.³ Datable to circa 1708-16, the decoration for La Muette is one of the earliest examples of chinoiserie used in a decorative scheme in France.  Watteau’s designs made a profound impact on other artists such as Boucher who took up similar themes in his own work in the 1730s and 1740s.  Indeed, Watteau’s La Muette decorations, in their wider dissemination through the series of engravings, have been credited with providing the inspiration for the development of the chinoiserie as a distinct genre in French art.⁴

Watteau created thirty paintings for the room, twenty six of which were of small rectangular format.  Of these twenty six, all depict a single figure in a landscape setting, except the present pair which each has two figures.  The titles of the paintings are taken from the published engravings.  Viosseu or Chinese Musician depicts a man seated on the ground, wearing a blue robe and pagoda-shaped straw hat.  He plays a hurdy-gurdy while a woman behind him listens, leaning her left arm on a low wall.  Chinese Woman of Kouei Tchéou portrays a young woman, also seated on the ground, wearing a voluminous rose-colored dressing gown with blue sash.  She points at something out of the picture plane with her right hand while looking down to the left.  She is accompanied by a child in a blue robe, with shaved head and crossed arms.  The figures in both are set against distant, mountainous landscapes and the artist has used a palette of exquisitely subtle shades of blue, green and pink.

In her reconstruction of the cabinet at La Muette, Katie Scott (see Literature) proposes that the small rectangular pictures were arranged in two tiers and that Chinese Musician and Chinese Woman were positioned on the top level, possibly inset above pier-mirrors or overmantles.  The trompe l’oeil “gilt” frames on both pictures may have formed part of the decoration or could have been added later after the room had been dismantled in order to transform them into cabinet pictures.⁵  In addition to the figural paintings by Watteau, it is thought that there were arabesques, most likely painted by Claude III Audran with whom Watteau was working in circa 1708-12.

 

1.  See K. Scott, under Literature, p. 192.
2.  Ibid., pp. 192-193.
3.  See N. Dezallier d’Argenville, Voyages pittoresques des Evirons de Paris, Paris 1762, pp. 14-16.
4.  See P. Stein, under Literature, pp. 599-600.
5.  K. Scott, op.cit, p. 196 and note 32.