Jean Antoine Watteau

Inserted in a sketchbook of F. Coke Smyth, dating from circa 1835 (according to the Oppé inventory);
sale, London, Robinson and Fisher, 16-17 June 1914 (purchased at the sale)

London, Royal Academy, Drawings by Old Masters, 1953, no. 399;
London, Royal academy, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, no. 341;
Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada, Exhibition of Works from the Paul Oppé Collection, 1961, no. 155

K.T. Parker, The Drawings of Antoine Watteau, London 1931, pp. 10-11;
K.T. Parker and P. Mathey, Antoine Watteau, catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, 2 vols., Paris 1957, vol. I, p. 17, no. 101, reproduced;
J. Saint-Paulien, 'Sur les dessins de Watteau: les écritures secrètes,' Nouvelle Revue des Deaux Mondes, 1972, p. 75;
M. Roland Michel, Watteau. Un artiste au XVIIIe siècle, Paris and London 1984, p. 117;
M. Morgan Grasselli, 'The Drawings of Antoine Watteau, stylistic development and problems of chronology,' PhD thesis, Harvard University 1987, p. 121, no. 49, fig. 107;
P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Antoine Watteau 1684-1721, Catalogue raisonné des dessins, 3 vols., Milan 1996, vol. I, p. 140-141, no. 89, reproduced

Laid down on an old mount. The sheet has very slightly discoloured and there are some minor areas of surface dirt to the extremities and some very minor foxing. The red chalk medium remains strong and vibrant throughout this lively sheet.
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With its fluid handling of the red chalk medium, animated subject and original composition, this is an excellent and rare example of Watteau’s early drawing style. As Pierre Rosenberg engagingly described in the introduction to the catalogue of the recent Royal Academy exhibition of Watteau’s drawings, extremely little is actually known about Watteau’s early life and career, before he was accepted into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, in July 1712.¹  He is, though, generally believed to have worked in association with Claude Gillot for a couple of years, probably in his early twenties, and then to have returned to his native Valenciennes (still essentially a Flemish city, having only been absorbed into France some six years before the artist’s birth), where he made various drawings of military subjects, before returning to Paris to establish himself as a painter.  

Given how short Watteau’s career was – all the drawings that we know from his hand were executed in hardly more than 15 years, before his premature death at the age of 37 – it is hard to establish a clear chronology of style, but in general his drawings executed solely in red chalk, rather than in some combination of red, black and white chalks, are either early works or copies after other masters. The stylistic link with the work of Gillot is also particularly evident in the present drawing, and these factors have led scholars to agree that this is an early drawing:  Margaret Morgan Grasselli places it around 1711, and Rosenberg and Prat described it as no later than 1710-11, commenting on similarities, in particular in the handling of certain accents, with drawings that may be even earlier, such as the one now only known through a counterproof, in Stockholm.²

In some ways, the closest comparison in terms of style can be found in drawings such as The Mountebank, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford³, which Grasselli considers extremely early, dating perhaps from around 1707-9, or the Study of Two Actors, in the Koenigs Collection at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam.⁴  The former of these also shows considerable echoes of Gillot together with the rather fluid, curvilinear lines seen here, while in the latter, we see more of the distinctive accents, in for example eyes and other facial features, that are also characteristic of the Oppé drawing.  This combination is even more evident in the three early drawings by Watteau now in Darmstadt, in particular the one representing Actors Parodying a Military Parade.⁵  The dimensions of the three Darmstadt drawings are also very similar to those of the Oppé drawing. 

Though the subject matter represented in this drawing, the fête champêtre, seems to the modern viewer so utterly typical both of Watteau and of the art of his time, it was in fact ground-breaking for a French artist of the early years of the 18^th century to treat this type of scene seriously.  In Dutch and Flemish art such revelries were, of course, widely painted and much appreciated throughout the 17^th century, but in the French academic context they had been accorded little attention or respect; indeed, the Académie even had to create a new category of officially sanctioned subject – the ‘fête galante’ (defined in a contemporary dictionary as ‘Festivities by decent folk’) – specifically to accommodate Watteau. 

This very significant drawing encapsulates all the elements of style, technique, subject matter and composition on which Watteau would base his extraordinary subsequent creations, and provides an important key to understanding the artistic origins of this greatest of 18^th-century draughtsmen.  It is also a delightful and highly attractive drawing in its own right. 

^1.  P. Rosenberg, 'Watteau and His Contemporaries,' in Watteau, the Drawings, exhib. cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, 2011, pp. 11-12  

^2.  Rosenberg & Prat, op. cit., no. 16

^3.  Ibid., no. 19

^4.  Ibid., no. 115

^5.  Ibid., no. 112