Antoine Watteau: His Life, Work, and the Fête Galante

Though his career was short, Antoine Watteau’s work greatly influenced the European art world. The French painter is best remembered for his Fête Galante paintings, a genre that the French Academy of Arts invented to classify Watteau’s representation of garden parties where well-dressed couples mingled in idealized landscapes. Watteau’s twelve years of activity marked the early 18th-century aesthetics well beyond France’s borders. A subtle eroticism characterizing his paintings, making Antoine Watteau a leading figure in French taste across Europe.

Watteau was one of the representatives of the Rococo movement. After Louis XIV’s powerful grip over the aristocracy and bourgeoisie ended, next came the Regency of the Duc d’Orléans and Louis XV’s reign was a welcomed respite. This positive vibe also influenced the arts. Watteau’s Fête Galante perfectly illustrates the frivolous atmosphere prevalent among the aristocratic and socialite elites after the stark period at the end of Louis XIV’s reign.

The son of a roofer, Jean-Antoine Watteau was born in 1684 in Valenciennes. The city was part of the County of Hainaut, now located in Northern France, near the Belgian border. Though he began his early artistic apprenticeship in Valenciennes, Watteau’s talent flourished when he moved to Paris in 1702.

At the beginning of the 18th century, The French capital was one of the largest cities in Europe and at the forefront of artistic life. When Louis XIV’s reign ended in 1715, Paris took over Versailles and its Court as the kingdom’s top city. The buzzing capital became the home of various artists, including the commedia dell’arte troupes, theatre groups who performed impromptu acts in the streets. Italian comedians imported this popular theatre genre characterized by masked actors’ representation of naive and witty displays. Several characters still famous today came from the established repertoire of the commedia dell’arte, such as Harlequin and Pierrot.

In the early 18th century, Watteau worked at the service of a Parisian painter, doing the tedious job of copying diverse religious and genre paintings. Antoine studied the old masters, especially Flemish painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck, and Venetian masters such as Titian and Veronese. Upon meeting engraver and painter Claude Gillot who became his master, Watteau discovered the rich characters coming from the commedia dell’arte. He further developed his talents at the service of French painter and designer of ornament Claude Audran III.

Watteau’s work became popular and saleable thanks to several fortuitous encounters with artists and merchants who acknowledged his talents. Great collectors such as French financier Pierre Crozat and Frederick the Great, King of Prussia bought several of Watteau’s paintings, fostering the painter’s success.

Between 1718 and 1719, Watteau painted a full-length portrait of Pierrot, surrounded by other commedia dell’arte characters, one of his most famous paintings. Claude Gillot’s taste for theater certainly inspired Watteau to paint this oil on canvas. Pierrot is one of the best-known characters from the commedia dell’arte. He is one of the zanni, or servants, recognizable by his white costume and powdered face. Unlike his fellow commedia dell’arte characters, Pierrot does not wear a mask. He is a cunning servant with some common sense.

In 1717, Watteau presented The Embarkation for Cythera to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, i.e., the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, based in Paris. The painter presented this oil on canvas as his reception piece, a piece representative of his work, to be admitted as a member of the academy. In fact, Watteau already became an academician in 1712, but only five years later, after several reminders, he presented his reception piece to the jury.

As no category suited this new type of painting, the French Academy especially invented the term “Fête Galante,” meaning courtship party, to label Watteau’s depiction of the joyful reunions of aristocrats in an idealized open landscape. Some consider it a subcategory of the Fête Champêtre genre. The academy gave this name to 18th-century garden parties organized in prestigious locations such as the gardens of Versailles in order to entertain the aristocracy with music and costumes. The Fête Galante genre stood between history painting and portrait in the hierarchy of genres.

The hierarchy of genres, theorized in the 17th century by French chronicler of the arts and court historian André Félibien, ranked mythological and religious subjects included in history painting above everyday-life representations. By inventing this new genre, Watteau earned the recognition of his fellow academicians and the funds of wealthy clients more interested in aristocratic than mythological representations.

Watteau borrowed the idealized landscapes of mythological subjects as the decor for his new genre. The Embarkation for Cythera is often considered the prototype of a Fête Galante. It depicts the arrival of lavishly dressed aristocrats on the Greek island of Cythera. Cythera or Kythira is a place associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love in ancient Greek mythology. As dozens of cupids fly around, several couples are engaged in an erotic rendezvous. At the same time, a statue of Venus, Aphrodite’s equivalent in Roman mythology, watches over them. At first glance, the subject and ambiance seem cheerful. Upon a closer look, however, the painting represents a departure rather than an arrival on the island of romance. Even if its title suggests otherwise, it seems just the opposite; one by one, the couples leave the island in a heavy atmosphere.

The Fête Galante represents a moment of pure idleness only accessible to the aristocracy. The subjects of these paintings are both light and dark. On the one hand, the main attributes are seduction and eroticism; on the other hand, the atmosphere is mysterious and melancholic. This genre embodied a state of grace in the French arts.

Watteau was a master at depicting subtle eroticism. His couples are close, yet not entirely embracing each other, their gestures working in unison. At a time when women rarely revealed certain parts of their figures, the simple evocation of a bare neck or flushed skin revealed the libertine power of the painting.

On the other hand, the men depicted in Watteau’s work are confident and nonchalant. Sometimes, an open pouch containing recently picked flowers at his feet may evoke the upcoming sexual intercourse. Flowers and other natural elements also have a specific meaning, often associated with romance and pleasure.

Watteau was one of the first painters to represent the reality of love, showing all the shades of a love story, from first encounters to passion and separation, from joy and hope to disenchantment and despair.

Antoine Watteau’s Work in Light of Romanticism

During the neoclassical period, the subtle eroticism of Watteau’s Fête Galante was disregarded along with the libertine penchant of the Ancien Régime, the period preceding the 1789 French Revolution. Neoclassicism quickly erased the whimsicality of Rococo artworks.

During the 19th century, romantic artists rediscovered Watteau’s work, and its melancholic character directly appealed to them. In their eyes, the Fête Galante lost its joyful tone, and they focused on the mysterious and dark atmosphere of the scenes. The dark colors of the paintings were partly due to the aging varnish that could darken a painting’s colors in only a dozen years because of its lack of stability. Watteau’s bright and pastel colors turned into autumnal shades.

British romantic artist William Turner paid tribute to Antoine Watteau in his 1831 Watteau Study by Fresnoy’s Rule. Turner depicted Watteau surrounded by his paintings and several admirers.

Yet the melancholic aspect of Watteau’s paintings was not totally invented by the romantics. Watteau’s vibrating and nervous brushstrokes gave the illusion of a changing and ephemeral reality, and so did the subjects depicted. Accordingly, love can be a fleeting emotion against its greatest enemy: time.

Antoine Watteau was at the peak of his career when he died. He passed away at the age of 36, perhaps of tuberculosis. As an innovative and popular artist, Watteau’s painting durably influenced his contemporaries and artists working long after his disappearance. French painter Nicolas Lancret who worked under the guidance of Claude Gillot along with Watteau followed in his companion’s footsteps. He did so well that two of his paintings were falsely attributed to Watteau, provoking the wrath and jealousy. Later, instead of painting imaginary and mysterious landscapes, Lancret entrenched his characters in reality. His contemporaries could easily recognize certain places depicted in his work. Yet, Lancret’s work lacked the subtle balance between the joyful scene and a certain sense of melancholy and awareness of life’s futile character so well represented in Watteau’s paintings.

French Rococo painters François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard suggested a more personal vision of the Fête Galante. François Boucher was a prolific artist inspired by Watteau’s work. He became the undisputed master of the Rocaille style. Following the strong moralizing sentimentalism of the 1760s and 1780s, when libertine imagery was disregarded as far from “true love,” Jean-Honoré Fragonard renewed the Fête Galante genre and brought it back to life at the end of the 18th century.

Watteau’s work kept on influencing artists later on. One of Paul Verlaine’s best-known poetry collections was directly inspired by Watteau’s Fête Galante. The iconic 19th-century French poet published the Fêtes Galantes collection of 22 poems in 1869. As Watteau did in his paintings, Verlaine staged seduction scenes between Commedia dell’arte characters in idealized rural landscapes. Some experts even claimed that Watteau’s paintings and the way he played with colors and light represented the premise of Impressionism.