Antoine Watteau is another artist of great power and originality, who made a very marked impression on the Continental schools of the eighteenth century. Although he died at the early age of thirty-seven he became quite a chef d’école. Lancret was the best of his imitators, but dexterous and clever as Lancret’s pictures are, they hardly equal the best of Watteau’s. We have often read and heard about the humble beginnings of artists, who subsequently became famous, but the poverty and squalor of Watteau’s student life have, I should think, never been rivalled. He left his native town, Valenciennes, for Paris without money and with hardly a rag to cover him. With difficulty he obtained work at a kind of sign-painter’s, whose principal business was in the religious votive picture line. A number of young students were employed by this dealer, and quantity was more insisted on than quality. Watteau got three francs a week, and as he was an excellent workman he had a bowl of soup given him every day. He did not stay very long with this man, but for many years his poverty compelled him to work for others. During all this time he never ceased taking every opportunity of sketching from nature, and thus laid the foundations of his subsequent extraordinary facility. Ultimately he was fortunate enough to meet with the best kind of patron, not a pompous big-wig who condescended to sit for his portrait, but a gentleman who possessed a first-class collection of drawings by the old masters, and who allowed Watteau to sketch and copy to his heart’s content. This completed our artist’s education. He formed his style of color on P. Veronese and Rubens, but his elegant and spirituel drawing and the crisp dexterity of his touch were all his own. It may surprise some to hear that the painter of the frivolous, masquerading scenes and of the foppish humors of his day was of a mild and rather melancholy disposition, longing for the quiet of a country life, and the unsophisticated joys of a poultry-yard and cabbage-garden. Watteau’s fame increased after his death, when it was found that not one of his numerous imitators could equal him. This fame was completely swept away by the great classical wave which deluged France toward the close of the century. This wave in its turn receded, and Watteau is now again at high-water mark.
The able French critic, M. Villot, asks apropos of this flux and reflux of popular estimation—“Pourquoi ne pas rendre justice en tout temps (quel que soit le genre, quelle que soit la forme) à l’originalite, à la force, au sentiment, en un mot au vrai génie?” The answer is, Who is to determine what “vrai génie” is? It is just because the art-world in the time of David could see no genius in Watteau that they treated his work with the most ignominious contempt, and it is because the present French school is intensely anticlassical that the paintings of the first Empire are looked upon with loathing. I am afraid that fashion rules public opinion in art as much as she does in dress.
There are very few artists and still fewer critics who can (like M. Villot) give an unprejudiced opinion about two such dissimilar painters as Watteau and David.
They (like politicians) take either one side or the other. They are swayed by party, and we all know what that means. We all know the respectful homage paid by Liberals to Conservatives, and vice versâ.
I now come to the painters who are most typical of the eighteenth century. These were the brothers Vanloo and Boucher. I group them together, as their style and the subjects they treated were so similar that for my purpose these three or four painters may be treated as one.
Gifted with a marvellous facility of brush, with great industry, and with no scruples about purity of style, these facile decorative painters got through an incredible amount of work. Boucher especially fairly glutted the market with pictures and drawings of every conceivable subject, and as (although a man of pleasure) he made it a rule to work ten hours a day, it may be understood that a good deal of this work was mechanical and commonplace.
The color of all the pictures of this school is as fictitious as the drawing, but for all that it is not disagreeable from a decorative point of view; and none but very clever men could have ignored nature with so little impunity. When I was a student in Paris, the traditions of the David school had not died out, and to call an artist a Boucher or a Vanloo was the ne plus ultra of insult. Old David himself, however, seems to have been more just to Boucher, for when one of his fanatical classical followers was railing against that master, “I can tell you,” says David, “that it is not given to every one to be a Boucher.” No doubt he was right. It is not given to every one to produce over 10,000 works of art, none of which can be said to be much below mediocrity, and some greatly above it.
Boucher, and even the much-abused Vanloo, were infinitely better painters in every respect than any artist Italy could produce at this period. They at any rate had a style of their own, which is more than can be said for Maratti, Pomponi, and the other miserable followers of the once great Italian school.
The style was neither noble nor pure, but it was all the better suited for the decoration of Louis XV apartments. Another figure-painter contemporary with Boucher and the Vanloos was Greuze.
This artist is a very striking illustration of the power of fashion over the popularity of a painter. It is not many years ago since a good specimen of Greuze was worth more than a fine Rembrandt or Van der Helst. This strange Greuze mania lasted a few years, and then happily died gradually away.