Antoine Watteau, who guided the stream of French art into this new channel—of the Netherlands—was by birth and training a Fleming. His birthplace, Valenciennes, although French territory since the Peace of Nymeguen, resembled in its whole character a Flemish town. In the church here he first saw any of Rubens’ pictures. Here, through Gérin, he became instructed in Flemish traditions. Rubens and Teniers are the two masters from whom his own art sprang. During the years when the war of the Spanish Succession had changed the French frontier provinces into a huge military camp, he painted soldiers and camp scenes, such as the “March” in the collection of Edmund Rothschild, where a party of recruits are straggling along a high plain in a fierce storm. Later came pictures of country life in the manner of Teniers, like the “Retour de Guinguette,” engraved by Chedel, a landscape in which on the right a party of rustics are carousing at a table in front of a farmyard, while on the other side half-drunken men and women are going home. Louis XIV had made before the pictures of Teniers his well-known mot: “Otez moi ces magots.” Now, through Watteau, the magot makes its entrance into French art. Thus in his chief picture in this manner, “La Vraie Gaieté,” the figures are unmistakably after Teniers. The men are short and sturdy, entirely Flemish. Only the costumes have changed with the mode. But the women are not in the least Flemish. The clean caps and tidy kerchiefs, the freshly ironed aprons, and neat little feet that trip so lightly and quickly along the street that no dirt seems to soil them, give these peasant girls a certain desirability in which it is not hard to discover the transition to French grace. The elegant motions and fine heads point to that Watteau who was to become soon afterwards the unsurpassable delineator of feminine coquetry.

Gillot and Rubens led him into the new road. The Teniers-like character of his figures disappeared, they became gracious and noble. In place of the magot came elegant French society. Gillot was the first in Paris to break with the pompous Louis XIV style, and to begin the representation of the cheerful life of comedians, to replace the dwellers in Olympus by characters of the French and Italian stage. Rubens had been the first in his “Garden of Love,” of the Dresden and Madrid Galleries, to invite to the embarkation for the Island of Cythera. Watteau acquired something from everyone he studied, and yet resembles none. After having hitherto sought his personages on the highways and in camps, he was now to become the painter of fêtes galantes, the painter of “Society.” For in his shepherds and shepherdesses there lives the elegance of France. The gods of the Renaissance, in whom no one any longer believed, glided into the costumes of Harlequin and Pierrette. In lieu of the great and the pathetic there came the small, the gay, the graceful, the dainty. The architectural symmetry of composition disappeared, and the stiff stage-scenery character of landscape vanished. The grave formality of geometrical construction is changed into freedom and joyousness, just as the rhetorical, exact, measured periods of Boileau were relaxed, under the hands of Voltaire, into sentences unconstrained, buoyant, and crisp. Watteau’s art betokened the triumph of naturalism over the mannerism into which the French art of the seventeenth century, based on the Italian Renaissance, had dwindled. As it is said in an old poem—

“Parée à la Françoise, un jour Dame Nature Eut le desir coquet de voir sa portraiture. Que fit la bonne mère? Elle enfanta Watteau.”

Watteau became for French art what, a hundred years before, Rubens had been for Flemish—the deliverer. He delivered them from the oppressive yoke of the Italian tradition. In his world, where there were no longer any naked goddesses, but where the corset was opened only just wide enough to reveal a rosy bosom, there was nothing more left of the past. It is no longer antique beauty, no longer the plastic cold of the “Venus di Milo,” no longer the marble perfection of Raphael’s “Galatea.” Into those tender, feminine hands, into those lace sleeves, out of which snow-white arms come languishingly forth, into those slender waists, and teasing, dimpled chins, something of coquetry, of sensibility, something subtle and spiritual, has entered, that seems to transcend physical beauty. His young men are tall and supple, his women entirely indescribable, with their air of quiet roguishness and their exquisite coiffures. Quite modern is that distinguished sense for costume which made him a leader of fashion. Mysterious landscapes, that exhale peace and happiness all around! Rightly has Edmond de Goncourt called him a lyric poet, the great poet of the eighteenth century.

ANTOINE WATTEAU.

In this way the development proceeded. The pompous representation which portrait painting had practised hitherto was gone. People would no longer be masters of the ceremonies, but human beings. New forms of technique were discovered, such as pastel painting. No other material was capable of rendering the peculiar fragrance of this fugitive flower nature, the graceful appearance of this rococo style, of these ladies with the touch of powder in their hair, and their moist, dreamy eyes, as Maurice Latour, Rosalba Carriera, and later the Swiss, Liotard, painted them. Of those who endeavoured, on the model of Watteau’s style, to depict the life of the fashionable world, none approached the delicacy of that national genius. Lancret and Pater followed him, but more roughly, more soberly, more drily. Lancret in his whole conception, compared with Watteau, is a homely, often a somewhat cumbrous journeyman; Pater, an artist of greater elegance, has the fickleness of the virtuoso. Both in conviction and in art they lacked that poetic, glorifying breath which pervades Watteau’s creations. In Watteau one believes that these gracious beings, these tall and nervous cavaliers, these amiable coquettes and comely women, actually represent originals in noble society; whereas in the works of his disciples it often happens that the paid model, selected from a lower circle of society, appears to us to be not congruous with the elegance of her wardrobe. These dancers, huntsmen, and noble maidens are not wholly what they should represent. But how delicious they are, these French gossips, so long as one is mindful not to think of Watteau! What grace is theirs too! What innate tact! With what a pleasant adroitness do they understand how to rivet our attention, and to keep far, far away from the tedium in which their classical ancestors, with their natural heaviness, waded! Instinctively and without effort they rejected the rhythmically balanced composition and correct nobility of form of the classics, and found a characteristic expression for unconstrained gestures, pleasing movements, and refined elegance.

WATTEAU.LA PARTIE CARRÉE.
GREUZE.   “L’Art.”

Even the decorative painters abandoned more and more the much-worn paths of the Italians. François Lemoine gave them, by Rubens’ aid, the transition to a manner peculiarly French, elegant, sensuous, charming. His pupil, François Boucher, followed him. Like the sons of the seventeenth century, he made exhaustive use of mythological subjects and was often a superficial artist, and in his later works he became entirely a mannerist; but he was not so at the beginning. It was a great advance for France when Boucher gave his pupils the advice to abstain from imitation of the great Italian masters, and not to grow “as cold as ice.” And what a great naturalist he is in his numerous drawings and etchings, and in those marvellous groups of chubby children who are playing and tumbling about on clouds, or playing musical instruments shooting arrows, or sporting with flowers! “It is not every one who has the stuff to make a Boucher” even his great antagonist David has said of him.

In Fragonard, again, there was summed up all the joy of life and the frivolity, the lustrous, luxurious talent, the charming amiability and nimble sureness, of French art in the eighteenth century. Fragonard has painted everything. His great decorations are careless inspirations, sparkling with spirit and life. With him pastoral scenes alternate with episodes of everyday life—children, guitar players, women reading. Fragonard is a piquant, ingenious painter. Perhaps hardly any other painter has so much kissing in his pictures. His etching, “L’armoire,” of 1778, is well known. In that he already stood on the sure ground of popular life. The old rustic, who is armed with a formidable cudgel, is beating open, with the assistance of his wife, the doors of a great clothes cupboard, in which a handsome young fellow has hidden himself; close by is a pretty farm girl, weeping in confusion into her apron; in the background the curious and amazed little sisters are looking on.