The future painter of dainty and luxurious visions of wealth and breeding was ambitious, if miserable.
He forgot to be hungry, because his hours of leisure from the tyranny of the picture manufactory were filled with the joy of drawing incessantly everything that passed before his eyes, from the turn of a head to the flutter of a tempestuous petticoat. A bowl of soup for dinner is an excellent aid to work, and this period no doubt intensified Watteau's love of work and of Nature. The lifeless things he had to copy at the manufactory sent him into the realms of the real, and his great gift of "seeing" was storing up for him innumerable observations which were to be the structure of his future fancies.
One lucky day Watteau met Claude Gillot, the decorative painter, who on seeing his drawings invited him to live in his house and become his pupil and assistant. So ended his period of absolute want; henceforward Watteau began to find himself, even as disease had already found and marked him.
Claude Gillot's influence upon the formation of Watteau's taste and talent must not be underrated. He was a man of much ability, quite unlike the cold and formal painters of his time. His was a gay art: the mythology of lovers and nymphs, and the light life of the Italian Comedy—Pantaloon, Columbine, and Pierrot—"strange motley—coloured family, clothed in sunshine and silken striped." Gillot is certainly one of Watteau's earliest inspirers: his revolt against convention (even if revolt be too strong a word) influenced Watteau to the end of his life. With this happy rencontre began the serious development of Watteau's art. Life, no longer sordid, became luxurious in thought and application. Supersensitive, the artist mind of the pupil touched and extracted the taste of his master, improved upon it, and strengthened its own tendency for all that was dainty, elegant, and whimsical. Gillot's was a good influence; a capable craftsman, he gave freely, but the jealous side of his nature soon recognised in his intuitive pupil not only an adaptation of his own methods, but also an improvement upon them. In Watteau, no doubt, he saw his own faults, but he also saw his own virtues made finer and rarer. Whatever the reason, over-much similarity of temperament, professional jealousy, or irritability on Gillot's side; ingratitude, sensitiveness, fickleness, or a sense of superiority on Watteau's, this mutually helpful friendship of five years ended abruptly. We may never know the cause of the quarrel, but we do know that Watteau, although he always warmly praised Gillot's work and admitted his personal indebtedness, refused to be questioned in regard to their disagreement, and was silent about it even to his most intimate friends. Curious to relate, Gillot ceased to paint when Watteau left him, and became an etcher and engraver. Watteau certainly dated the knowledge of his own talent from his association with Gillot, his first real master.
PLATE III.—L'INDIFFÉRENT
(In the Louvre, Paris)
Through Watteau's dream-world trips "L'Indifférent," rainbow-hued, mercurial, his indifference assumed, not troubling to conceal the sad thoughtfulness that lurks in his expression. Who can describe Watteau's colour or his fashion of trickling on the paint? The technique of "L'Indifférent" is marvellous.
Claude Audran, to whom he went in 1708 at the age of twenty-four (taking his friends Pater and Lancret with him), was keeper or rather doorkeeper of the Luxembourg Palace, and a painter of the ornamental decorations then in vogue. Garlands and arabesques were his speciality. He taught his system of decoration to Watteau, who, sensitive to every artistic sensation, gleaned perhaps from Audran the sense of rhythmic line and made it one of his own chief characteristics.