PLATE--FÊTE CHAMPÊTRE
This exquisite picture displays nearly all the characteristics of Watteau's painting. He was said to paint with "honey and gold," and his method was certainly remarkable. His clear, delicate colours were put upon a canvas first daubed with oil, and he never cleaned his palette. His "oil-pot was full of dust and dirt and mixed with the washings of his brush." One would think that only the most slovenly results could come from such habits of work, but the artist made a colour which no one could copy, and that was a sort of creamy, opalescent white. This was original with Watteau, and most beautiful.
In this "Fête Champêtre," which is now in the National Gallery at Edinburgh, he paints an elegant group of ladies and gentlemen indulging in an open air dance of some sort. One couple are doing steps facing one another, to the music of a set of pipes, while the rest flirt and talk, decorously, round about. There is no boisterous rusticity here; all is dainty and refined.
The same characteristics are to be found in Watteau's other pictures such as, "Embarkation for the Island of Cythera," "The Judgment of Paris," and "Gay Company in a Park."
XLV
SIR BENJAMIN WEST
American
1738-1820
Pupil of the Italian School
The beautiful smile of his little niece helped to make this man an artist. This is the story:
Benjamin West was born down in Pennsylvania, at Westdale, a small village in the township of Springfield, of Quaker parentage. The family was poor perhaps, but in America at a time when everybody was struggling with a new civilisation it did not seem to be such binding poverty as the same condition in Europe would have been. Benjamin had a married sister whose baby he greatly loved, and he gave it devoted attention. One day while it was sleeping and the undiscovered artist was sitting beside it he saw it smile, and the beauty of the smile inspired him to keep it forever if he could. He got paper and pencil and forthwith transferred that "angel's whisper."