Consider "The Music Lesson." In colour it is rose and white. The man's garments are neither rose, nor white, nor yellow, and yet they are all three. The rose of the woman's rosette repeats the carmines of her complexion. The composition is charming. The movement, pose, and costume of the players is the same as the musicians in the "Musical Party," also at Hertford House. Delightful too in "Gilles and His Family." Gilles is dressed in thin, white, supple satin, lined with rose and striped with faint blue, and his white mantle is lined with blue. The dark bias of the guitar binds the group of people together, all of whom it touches or crosses. A seated woman nurses a little black and white dog, while a child nestles up to her, peeping beneath the guitar; the faces are more alert and smiling than usual, and the picture, although less pearly than "The Music Lesson," is not less beautiful in colour.
"Jupiter and Antiope" at the Louvre suggests Titian and Rubens filtered through Watteau. This nude studied from life, not painted from his drawings, is more laboured than his other pictures, but the loss of spontaneity in the colour is compensated by the truth and beauty of the abandon of the beautiful limbs in repose. Brown Jupiter, blonde Venus—no attenuation of the truth here—lights loaded, browns rich, with pearly reflections on the fair skin.
The attribution of the delightful "Pastoral" at the Louvre, although generally accepted, has been questioned. The elegant little lady shepherdess is in rose red, a red that seems to belong only to Velazquez and to Watteau; she sits watching, not the flock of one sheep and one wondering dog, no! she is listening to the Arcadian shepherd playing his flute. Very Watteau-like is the landscape.
Turn from these little works to the larger pictures, such as "The Return from the Chase," painted for his patron M. de Julienne towards the end of his life—a marvel of rhythmic line and tone; and to "Les Amusements Champêtres"—a bouquet of colour like no other colour, old rose, old blue, silvery yellow, prune purple, all partaking one of the other. In the distance people are sitting and standing and dancing in colours unrivalled.
So we may pass through the whole range of his production finding constantly some new surprise of colour, some new mastery in the weaving of his webs. Call Watteau, if you like, a painter of the frivolous side of life, but you must also call him one of the few originals whose pictures vivify because they stimulate, and because they excite interest in his method which marked a new epoch in art. "We consider Watteau," says his countryman, M. Camille Mauclair, "the most original and most representative master of French art; Watteau, Delacroix, and Monet are the three beacons of that art."
PLATE VI.—THE FOUNTAIN
(In the Wallace Collection)
One of his smaller pictures, 17½ ins. high by 13¼ wide, called also "La Cascade." It attracts attention by reason of the somewhat theatrical way in which the dainty silhouette of the figures is set against the opening between the trees. But how charming are these figures bathed in light and mirrored in the pool that ripples at their feet.
