Sous un habit de mezzetin
Ce gros brun au riant visage
Sur la guitarre avec sa main
Fait un aimable badinage.
Par les doux accords de sa voix
Enfants d'une bouche vermeille
Du beau sexe tant à la fois
Il charme les yeux et l'oreille.
In the little Lady at her Toilet (No. 439) we see the influence of Paul Veronese, though it is probable that this was not painted until he visited London in the later part of his short life. For there is a similar piece called La Toilette du Matin which was engraved by a French artist who had settled in England, Philip Mercier, and on whose work the influence of Watteau is very noticeable.
Le Rendez-vous de Chasse (No. 416), which is of the same size, and in character similar to Les Amusements Champêtres (No. 391), is the last by Watteau of which we have any certain knowledge. It was painted in 1720, the year before his death, when his health prevented him from making any sustained effort. It is said to have been a commission from his friends M. and Mme. de Julienne, in whose shooting-box at Saint Maur, between the woods of Vincennes and the river, he went to repose from time to time.
Nicholas Lancret was only by six years Watteau's junior, so that he can hardly be considered as a pupil or even a disciple, but only as an imitator of Watteau. He was the pupil of Claude Gillot, and afterwards his assistant, and it was not unnatural that a close friendship should have been formed between Lancret and Watteau, or that it should have been dissolved by the deliberate imitation by the former of the latter's style—seeing how successful the imitation was. Two of the pictures by Lancret at Hertford House, Nos. 422, Conversation Galante and 440, Fête in a Wood, are fair examples of how close, at one period of his career, the imitation became. The latter is the Bal dans un Bois which was exhibited at the Place Dauphiné, and was complained of by Watteau on account of its close resemblance to his own work.
Another in the Wallace Collection belongs to the same early period of Watteau's influence. The Italian Comedians by a Fountain (No. 465), being attributed to Watteau in the sale, in 1853, at which it was bought for Lord Hertford. His lordship was particularly anxious to secure this picture, "Between you and I," he writes, with the quaint regardlessness of grammar peculiar to the Victorian nobility, "(and to no other person but you should I make this confidence), I must have the Lancret called Watteau in the Standish Collection. So I depend upon you for getting it for me. I need not beg you not to mention a word about this to anybody, either before or after the sale." And again, "I depend upon your getting the Lancret (Watteau in the Catalogue) for me. I have no doubt it will sell for a good sum, most likely more than it is worth, but we must have it ... I leave it to you, but I must have it, unless by some unheard of chance it was to go beyond 3000 guineas." He was fortunate indeed in getting it for £735.
Mademoiselle Camargo Dancing (No. 393), and La Belle Grecque (No. 450), in the Wallace Collection, are good examples of the Comedian motive treated with more actuality, yet with no less grace. The four little allegorical pieces in the National Gallery, The Four Ages of Man, are more lively if less romantic, being composed more for the characters illustrating the subject than for poetical setting.
Jean Baptise Joseph Pater was actually a pupil of Watteau. He was ten years his junior, but was equally unhappy on account of his health, and died at forty. Like Lancret, he incurred Watteau's displeasure for a similar reason, though in his case it was rather the fear of what he would do than what he did that was the cause of Watteau's displeasure. At the same time, the names of both Lancret and Pater are inseparable from that of Watteau in the history of painting, and, both in their choice of subject and their treatment of it, they are hardly distinguishable to the casual observer. Watteau, it need hardly be said, was far above the other two, but it was fortunate indeed that his romantic genius had two such gifted imitators as Lancret and Pater—or to put it the other way, that they had such a master to imitate, without whom neither their work nor their influence would have been nearly as great as it was.
François Boucher, though doubtless influenced by Watteau, more especially at the outset of his brilliant career, was nevertheless independent of him in carrying forward the art painting in his country, choosing rather to revert to the patronage of the Court like his predecessors Le Brun, Rigaud, and Largillière than to devote himself to the expression of his own ideas and feelings. Being a pupil of François Le Moine, whose principal work was the decoration of Versailles, it is not unnatural that Boucher should have succumbed to the influence of Royalty, especially when exerted in his favour by as charming and as powerful an agent as Madame de Pompadour. Another early influence which shaped his artistic tendencies as well as his fortunes was that of Carle van Loo, in whose honour his countrymen coined the verb vanlotiser—to frivol agreeably—- on account of the popularity which he achieved as a painter of elegant trifles. There is a picture by Carle van Loo in the Wallace Collection entitled The Grand Turk giving a Concert to his Mistress (No. 451), painted in 1737, which is a fair example of his proficiency in this direction, and there are one or two portraits scattered about the country which he painted when over here for a few months towards the end of his life. He died in Paris on the 15th July 1765, and Boucher was immediately appointed his successor as principal painter to Louis XV.
Madame de Pompadour was more than a patron to him, she was a matron! She made an intimate friend and adviser of him, and it is to her that he owed most of his advancement at Court, which continued after her death. The full-length portrait of her at Hertford House (No. 418) was commissioned by her in 1759, and remained in her possession till her death in 1764. It was purchased by Lord Hertford in 1868 for 28,000 francs. In the Jones Collection at the South Kensington Museum is another portrait of her, and a third in the National Gallery at Edinburgh, not to mention those in private collections. The two magnificent cartoons on the staircase at Hertford House, called the Rising and Setting of the Sun, she begged from the king. These were ordered in 1748 as designs to be executed in tapestry at the Manufacture Royale des Gobelins, by Cozette and Audran, according to the catalogue of the Salon in 1753 when they were exhibited. They are characterised by the brothers de Goncourt as le plus grand effort du peintre, les deux grandes machines de son œuvre; and the writer of the catalogue of Madame de Pompadour's pictures when they were sold in 1766 testifies thus to the artist's own opinion of them: "J'ai entendu plusieurs fois dire par l'auteur qu'ils étaient du nombre de ceux dont il était le plus satisfait." They were then sold for 9800 livres, and Lord Hertford paid 20,200 francs for them in 1855.