Jean Antoine Watteau Valenciennes 1684 - 1721 Nogent-sur-Marne

Estimate

40,000 - 60,000 USD

bidding is closed

Description

Jean Antoine Watteau
two figures: a draughtsman seated holding a portfolio, another standing with his hand in his pocket
red chalk;
a slight sketch of drapery, and the outline of a woman's face, verso

Provenance

Camille Groult;
his son, Jean Groult, his sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 20 November 1941, in lot 17 (attributed to Quillard);
with Agnew's, London;
Mrs John Dewar, in London, 1947;
W.B. Henderson

Exhibited

London, Royal Academy, France in the Eighteenth Century, 1968, cat. no. 740;
Washington, National Gallery of Art; Paris, Grand Palais; Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, Antoine Watteau, 1984-85 (catalogue by Margaret Morgan Grasselli and Pierre Rosenberg), cat. no. D5 (and p. 256, under cat. no. P6, listed under related drawings and detail reproduced fig. 1)

Literature

K.T. Parker and J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau, Catalogue de l'oeuvre dessiné, 1957, vol.1, p. 37, cat. no. 255, reproduced;
Jean Cailleux, 'Four Studies of Soldiers by Watteau', in Supplement to The Burlington Magazine, vol. CI, no. 678/9 (Sept-Oct. 1959), p. 3 listed in his Group III;
Yuri Zolotov, Antoine Watteau, Catalogues raisonnés des tableaux et des dessins dans les musées russes, Leningrad 1973, p. 131, under no. 1;
Donald Posner, Antoine Watteau, London 1984, pp. 33, 40, 279 note 43;
Helmut Börsch-Supan, Watteau. Führer zur Austellung im Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin 1985, no. 21, reproduced;
Yuri Zolotov, Antoine Watteau, Paintings and Drawings from Soviet Museums, Leningrad, 1985, p. 103, under cat. no. 17-21;
Margaret Morgan Grasselli, The Drawings of Antoine Watteau, stylistic development and problems of chronology, 2 vols. unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., 1987, pp. 90-91, 125, no. 27, fig. 72;
Pierre Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat, Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721, Catalogue raisonné des dessins, Milan 1996, vol. 1, p. 102, cat. no. 65, reproduced;
Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Review of Rosenberg and Prat, in Master Drawings, vol. 39, no. 3 ( 2001), p. 314

Catalogue Note

The standing figure on the right appears, with slight alterations to his dress and pose, in Watteau's painting The Bivouac (fig.1) which is generally dated 1709-1710 (Moscow, Pushkin Museum, see Zolotov, op. cit., 1985, plate 17). This association is confirmed by the existence of a counterproof in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, which incorporates these figures and one of the cook who appears to the right in the painting. The drawing must have been cut in the 1960s, and the study of the cook is now in a private collection (Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., cat. no. 64). The figure of the seated artist does not appear in a painting.

The drawing fits stylistically with other figure studies of circa 1710. Margaret Morgan Grasselli wrote about it as follows in the 1984-5 exhibition catalogue: '...Watteau's concern for reality and 'truth to nature', for which he was so much admired, is already much in evidence, as are the crisp accenting, tightly controlled strokes, and firm contours characteristic of Wattteau's drawings through c. 1713-1714. The figures' comparatively insubstantial forms, however, are evidence of this drawing's early date.' (Grasselli, op. cit., 1984-85, p. 65).