LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
| Plate | ||
| I. | A Pastoral | [Frontispiece] |
| In the Louvre, Paris | ||
| Page | ||
| II. | The Ball under a Colonnade | [13] |
| In the Dulwich Gallery | ||
| III. | L'Indifférent | [24] |
| In the Louvre, Paris | ||
| IV. | The Embarkment for Cythera | [34] |
| In the Louvre, Paris | ||
| V. | Jupiter and Antiope | [39] |
| In the Louvre, Paris | ||
| VI. | The Fountain | [49] |
| In the Wallace Collection | ||
| VII. | Fête Champêtre | [59] |
| In the National Gallery of Scotland | ||
| VIII. | The Music Lesson | [70] |
| In the Wallace Collection | ||
PROLOGUE
THE apparition of Watteau in France in the early eighteenth century may be likened to the apparition of Giotto in Italy in the early fourteenth. Each was a genius; each broke away from the herd; each gave to the world a new vision; each inspired a school. But there the resemblance ends. Giotto's art was Christian, Watteau's Pagan; or, in other words, Giotto lived in an age when the aim of art was to teach religion, Watteau—well, his pictures were designed to delight. Giotto sought to remind men of Christianity, to bring them humbly to their knees with representations (marvellously fresh in those days when art was still groping in the Byzantine twilight) of the life of the Founder of Christianity, all its pathos, pity, and promise. Watteau gave joy and exhiliration to a generation temporally dull and morose, chilled by the academical art of the period, and apparently content with it. Watteau appeared: the little world about him looked at his pictures and, what a change! "Paris dressed, posed, picnicked, and conversed à la Watteau."
Poor Watteau! He gave, he gives joy, but he was sad, discontented, distrustful of himself and others. Sometimes Nature makes a great effort and unites genius to the sane mind and the sane body, as in a Titian, a Leonardo, a Shakespeare, a Goethe; more often she breathes genius into a fugitive and precarious shell, as in a Keats, a Francis Thompson, a Watteau, and ironically, or perhaps blessedly, gives them the phthisical temperament so that they crowd youth, adolescence, and age into a burst of hectic performances before they depart.