The unremitting study that made not only possible but sure an unvarying success, in themes so manifestly limited, is evidenced best in such collections of Watteau’s drawings as that acquired gradually by the British Museum, and that yet finer one inherited by the late Miss James, and now, alas! dispersed. There the complete command of line and character is best of all made clear, and the solid groundwork for success in Watteau’s pictures is revealed. Elsewhere—in the “Masters of Genre Painting”—I have found space to explain more fully than can be done in these pages, that however manifestly limited were his habitual themes, his range was really great enough, since—not to speak of the “Elysian Fields”—it covered the landscape and the life of the France he knew. He has drawn beggars as naturally as did Murillo; negroes as fearlessly as Rubens; people of the bourgeoisie as faithfully almost as Chardin. And, far from the cut chestnut-trees on whose trimmed straightness there falls in an unbroken mass the level light of his gardens, Watteau draws at need the open and common country, peasants and the soldiery, the baggage-train passing along the endless roads from some citadel that Vauban planned. What Watteau saw was the sufficient and the great foundation of all that he imagined, and his art’s abandonment of the everyday world was to exalt and to refine, rather than to forget it.
The line-engravings after Watteau—largeish, decorative, vigorous while delicate—remain comparatively inexpensive. A rare impression “before letters” attains, perhaps, now and then a fancy price; but Time has very little affected the money value of the impressions with full title, which, if reasonable care is exercised, can be secured in fine condition, of such a dealer as Colnaghi, here in England, and in Paris, of Danlos, say, or of Bouillon—occupied though they all of them are, habitually, with more costly things. Often two or three sovereigns buy you an excellent Watteau, clean and bright, and not bereft of margin. To have to give as much as £5 for one, would seem almost a hardship. And the work of Lancret and Pater—ingenious, interesting practitioners in Watteau’s School—may be annexed at an expense even less considerable.
Lancret was but a follower of Watteau: Pater was confessedly a pupil. We shall have to come to Chardin to find in French Art the next man thoroughly original. And Chardin was a great master. But Lancret and Pater, though they are but secondary, are still interesting figures. Neither of them, imitative though they were in varying degrees—neither of them made any pretentions to their forerunner’s inspired reverie. Lancret, as far as his invention was concerned, was at one time satisfied with a symbolism that was obvious, not to say bald. At another, as in the sedate L’Hiver (engraved by Le Bas), and the charming pictures of the games of children, Le Jeu de Cache-cache and Le Jeu des Quatre Coins (both of them engraved by De Larmessin), he was gracefully real, without effort at a more remote imagination than the themes of reality in gentle or in middle-class life exacted. At another time again, he lived so much in actual things, that he could make the portraits, not of deep grave men indeed such as the Bossuets and the Fénelons of the Seventeenth Century, but of the lighter celebrities of his careless day. That day was Louis the Fifteenth’s—“c’était le beau temps où Camargo trouvait ses jupes trop longues pour danser la gargouillade.” And Lancret painted Mdlle. Camargo (and Laurent Cars engraved her), springing to lively airs. Voltaire had said to her, distinguishing all her alacrity and fire from the more cautious graces of Sallé, the mistress of poetic pantomime—Voltaire had said to her—
“Les nymphes sautent comme vous,
Et les Graces dansent comme elle.”
And the truth of the description is attested by Lancret’s picture, and by the rosy and vivacious pastel in Latour’s Saint-Quentin Gallery.
Pater, a fellow-townsman of Antoine Watteau’s, was his pupil only in Watteau’s later years. At that time Watteau suffered from an irritability bred of an exhausting disease and of a yet more exhausting genius. Master and pupil fell out. But, in his last days of all, Watteau summoned to him the painter who had come from his own town, and in a month, for which the younger artist was ever grateful, Pater was taught more than he had ever been taught before. The pupil had the instinct for prettiness and grace, and in cultivating it Watteau was useful. But there was one thing the master could not teach him—originality. And his record of the engaging trivialities of daily life, where pleasure was most gracious and life most easy, was undertaken by a mind wholly contented with its task. The mind aspired no farther. The faces of Watteau, especially in his studies, are often faces of thoughtful beauty; sometimes, of profound and saddening experience. But, like a lesser Mozart—and the Mozart of a particular mood—Pater proffers us his engaging allegro. The aim of all his art—its light but successful endeavour—is summed up in the title of one of the prettiest of his prints and pictures. It is, Le désir de plaire.
Presently we leave that world of graceful fantasy, which Watteau invented, and his pupils prolonged—a world in which dainty refreshments are served to chosen companies under serene skies—and, still in the full middle of the Eighteenth Century, we are face to face with the one great artist of that age whom Watteau never affected. Chardin was the painter of the bourgeoisie. With a persistence just as marked as that of the most homely Dutchmen, but with a refinement of feeling to which they were generally strangers and which gave distinction to his treatment of his theme, he devoted himself to the chronicle of prosaic virtues. In his Art, no trace of the selected garden, of the elegant gallantries, of the excitement of Love, in the gay or luscious weather. The honest townspeople know hardly a break in their measured sobriety. They are mothers of families; the cares of the ménage press on them; house-work has to be got through; children taught, admonished, corrected. Never before or since have these scenes of the kitchen, the schoolroom, or the middle-class parlour, been painted with such dignity, such truth, such intimacy, and such permissible and fortunate reserve. We see them to perfection in Chardin’s prints—in the prints, I mean, that were made after him, for he himself engraved never. There are two other sides of his Art which the contemporary line-engravings do not show.
Chardin: Le Jeu de l’Oye.