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IMAGINARY PORTRAITS
by
Walter Pater
4th edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS
CHAPTER III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK
CHAPTER IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD
CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL
Valenciennes, September 1701.
They have been renovating my father's large workroom. That delightful,
tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green
weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed
wall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the
coolness, in summertime. Among old Watteau's workpeople came his son,
"the genius," my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth,
whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various
drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a
genius indeed, and a painter born. We have had our September Fair in
the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide,
open space beneath our windows. And just where the crowd was busiest
young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the
old Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of
grace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us,
in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own window--which
has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people in
some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the
humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw
a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of
comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought
his sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my father
questioned him and commended his work. But the lad seemed not greatly
pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga which was offered to
him. His father will hear nothing of educating him as a painter. Yet
he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built himself a new stone house,
big and grey and cold. Their old plastered house with the black
timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was prettier; dating from the time
of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in Valenciennes.
October 1701.
Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has
consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here. I meet him
betimes on the way to his lessons, as I return from Mass; for he still
works with the masons, but making the most of late and early hours, of
every moment of liberty. And then he has the feast-days, of which there
are so many in this old-fashioned place. Ah! such gifts as his, surely,
may once in a way make much industry seem worth while. He makes a
wonderful progress. And yet, far from being set-up, and too easily
pleased with what, after all, comes to him so easily, he has, my father
thinks, too little self-approval for ultimate success. He is apt, in
truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces. Yet
here also there is the "golden mean." Yes! I could fancy myself
offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half-melancholy
sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that as I can see, he
treats himself to the same quality.
October 1701.
Antony Watteau comes here often now. It is the instinct of a natural
fineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house,
with so little to interest, and that homely old man and woman. The
rudeness of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces
of life into a physical want, like hunger or thirst, which might come
to greed; and methinks he perhaps overvalues these things. Still, made
as he is, his hard fate in that rude place must needs touch one. And
then, he profits by the experience of my father, who has much knowledge
in matters of art beyond his own art of sculpture; and Antony is not
unwelcome to him. In these last rainy weeks especially, when he can't
sketch out of doors, when the wind only half dries the pavement before
another torrent comes, and people stay at home, and the only sound from
without is the creaking of a restless shutter on its hinges, or the
march across the Place of those weary soldiers, coming and going so
interminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the
English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:--Well! he has become
like one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He would
go far, in the literal sense, if he might--to Paris, to Rome. It must
be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place;
sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near the
frontier. The grass is growing deep on our old ramparts, and it is
pleasant to walk there--to walk there and muse; pleasant for a tame,
unambitious soul such as mine.
December 1792.
Antony Watteau left us for Paris this morning. It came upon us quite
suddenly. They amuse themselves in Paris. A scene-painter we have here,
well known in Flanders, has been engaged to work in one of the Parisian
play-houses; and young Watteau, of whom he had some slight knowledge,
has departed in his company. He doesn't know it was I who persuaded the
scene-painter to take him; that he would find the lad useful. We
offered him our little presents--fine thread-lace of our own making for
his ruffles, and the like; for one must make a figure in Paris, and he
is slim and well-formed. For myself, I presented him with a silken
purse I had long ago embroidered for another. Well! we shall follow his
fortunes (of which I for one feel quite sure) at a distance. Old
Watteau didn't know of his departure, and has been here in great anger.
December 1703.
Twelve months to-day since Antony went to Paris! The first struggle
must be a sharp one for an unknown lad in that vast, overcrowded place,
even if he be as clever as young Antony Watteau. We may think, however,
that he is on the way to his chosen end, for he returns not home;
though, in truth, he tells those poor old people very little of
himself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labour
all day long, each at a single part only,--coiffure, or robe, or
hand,--of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for sale
at a low price along the footways of the Pont Notre-Dame. Antony is
already the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted of
late to work on church pictures. I like the thought of that. He
receives three livres a week for his pains, and his soup daily.
May 1705.
Antony Watteau has parted from the dealer in pictures a bon marche and
works now with a painter of furniture pieces (those headpieces for
doors and the like, now in fashion) who is also concierge of the Palace
of the Luxembourg. Antony is actually lodged somewhere in that grand
place, which contains the king's collection of the Italian pictures he
would so willingly copy. Its gardens also are magnificent, with
something, as we understand from him, altogether of a novel kind in
their disposition and embellishment. Ah! how I delight myself, in fancy
at least, in those beautiful gardens, freer and trimmed less stiffly
than those of other royal houses. Methinks I see him there, when his
long summer-day's work is over, enjoying the cool shade of the stately,
broad-foliaged trees, each of which is a great courtier, though it has
its way almost as if it belonged to that open and unbuilt country
beyond, over which the sun is sinking.
His thoughts, however, in the midst of all this, are not wholly away
from home, if I may judge by the subject of a picture he hopes to sell
for as much as sixty livres--Un Depart de Troupes, Soldiers
Departing--one of those scenes of military life one can study so well
here at Valenciennes.
June 1705.
Young Watteau has returned home--proof, with a character so independent
as his, that things have gone well with him; and (it is agreed!) stays
with us, instead of in the stone-mason's house. The old people suppose
he comes to us for the sake of my father's instruction. French people
as we are become, we are still old Flemish, if not at heart, yet on the
surface. Even in French Flanders, at Douai and Saint Omer, as I
understand, in the churches and in people's houses, as may be seen from
the very streets, there is noticeable a minute and scrupulous air of
care-taking and neatness. Antony Watteau remarks this more than ever on
returning to Valenciennes, and savours greatly, after his lodging in
Paris, our Flemish cleanliness, lover as he is of distinction and
elegance. Those worldly graces he seemed when a young lad to hunger and
thirst for, as though truly the mere adornments of life were its
necessaries, he already takes as if he had been always used to them.
And there is something noble--shall I say?--in his half-disdainful way
of serving himself with what he still, as I think, secretly values
over-much. There is an air of seemly thought--le bel serieux--about
him, which makes me think of one of those grave old Dutch statesmen in
their youth, such as that famous William the Silent. And yet the effect
of this first success of his (of more importance than its mere money
value, as insuring for the future the full play of his natural powers)
I can trace like the bloom of a flower upon him; and he has, now and
then, the gaieties which from time to time, surely, must refresh all
true artists, however hard-working and "painful."
July 1705.
The charm of all this--his physiognomy and manner of being--has touched
even my young brother, Jean-Baptiste. He is greatly taken with Antony,
clings to him almost too attentively, and will be nothing but a
painter, though my father would have trained him to follow his own
profession. It may do the child good. He needs the expansion of some
generous sympathy or sentiment in that close little soul of his, as I
have thought, watching sometimes how his small face and hands are moved
in sleep. A child of ten who cares only to save and possess, to hoard
his tiny savings! Yet he is not otherwise selfish, and loves us all
with a warm heart. Just now it is the moments of Antony's company he
counts, like a little miser. Well! that may save him perhaps from
developing a certain meanness of character I have sometimes feared for
him.
August 1705.
We returned home late this summer evening--Antony Watteau, my father
and sisters, young Jean-Baptiste, and myself--from an excursion to
Saint-Amand, in celebration of Antony's last day with us. After
visiting the great abbey-church and its range of chapels, with their
costly encumbrance of carved shrines and golden reliquaries and funeral
scutcheons in the coloured glass, half seen through a rich enclosure of
marble and brasswork, we supped at the little inn in the forest.
Antony, looking well in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, and
taller than he really is, made us bring our cream and wild strawberries
out of doors, ranging ourselves according to his judgment (for a hasty
sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of
those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while
Jean-Baptiste and my youngest sister danced a minuet on the grass, to
the notes of some strolling lutanist who had found us out. He is
visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and became for
a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he
discoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the church
here. His words, as he spoke of them, seemed full of a kind of rich
sunset with some moving glory within it. Yet I like far better than any
of these pictures of Rubens a work of that old Dutch master, Peter
Porbus, which hangs, though almost out of sight indeed, in our church
at home. The patron saints, simple, and standing firmly on either side,
present two homely old people to Our Lady enthroned in the midst, with
the look and attitude of one for whom, amid her "glories" (depicted in
dim little circular pictures, set in the openings of a chaplet of pale
flowers around her) all feelings are over, except a great pitifulness.
Her robe of shadowy blue suits my eyes better far than the hot
flesh-tints of the Medicean ladies of the great Peter Paul, in spite of
that amplitude and royal ease of action under their stiff court
costumes, at which Antony Watteau declares himself in dismay.
August 1705.
I am just returned from early Mass. I lingered long after the office
was ended, watching, pondering how in the world one could help a small
bird which had flown into the church but could find no way out again. I
suspect it will remain there, fluttering round and round distractedly,
far up under the arched roof till it dies exhausted. I seem to have
heard of a writer who likened man's life to a bird passing just once
only, on some winter night, from window to window, across a
cheerfully-lighted hall. The bird, taken captive by the ill-luck of a
moment, re-tracing its issueless circle till it expires within the
close vaulting of that great stone church:--human life may be like that
bird too!
Antony Watteau returned to Paris yesterday. Yes!--Certainly, great
heights of achievement would seem to lie before him; access to regions
whither one may find it increasingly hard to follow him even in
imagination, and figure to one's self after what manner his life moves
therein.
January 1709.
Antony Watteau has competed for what is called the Prix de Rome,
desiring greatly to profit by the grand establishment founded at Rome
by Lewis the Fourteenth, for the encouragement of French artists. He
obtained only the second place, but does not renounce his desire to
make the journey to Italy. Could I save enough by careful economies for
that purpose? It might be conveyed to him in some indirect way that
would not offend.
February 1712.
We read, with much pleasure for all of us, in the Gazette to-day, among
other events of the world, that Antony Watteau had been elected to the
Academy of Painting under the new title of Peintre des Fetes Galantes,
and had been named also Peintre du Roi. My brother, Jean-Baptiste, ran
to tell the news to old Jean-Philippe and Michelle Watteau.
A new manner of painting! The old furniture of people's rooms must
needs be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with this
painting; or rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit one
particular kind of apartment. A manner of painting greatly prized, as
we understand, by those Parisian judges who have had the best
opportunity of acquainting themselves with whatever is most enjoyable
in the arts:--such is the achievement of the young Watteau! He looks to
receive more orders for his work than he will be able to execute. He
will certainly relish--he, so elegant, so hungry for the colours of
life--a free intercourse with those wealthy lovers of the arts, M. de
Crozat, M. de Julienne, the Abbe de la Roque, the Count de Caylus, and
M. Gersaint, the famous dealer in pictures, who are so anxious to lodge
him in their fine hotels, and to have him of their company at their
country houses. Paris, we hear, has never been wealthier and more
luxurious than now: and the great ladies outbid each other to carry his
work upon their very fans. Those vast fortunes, however, seem to change
hands very rapidly. And Antony's new manner? I am unable even to divine
it--to conceive the trick and effect of it--at all. Only, something of
lightness and coquetry I discern there, at variance, methinks, with his
own singular gravity and even sadness of mien and mind, more answerable
to the stately apparelling of the age of Henry the Fourth, or of Lewis
the Thirteenth, in these old, sombre Spanish houses of ours.
March 1713.
We have all been very happy,--Jean-Baptiste as if in a delightful
dream. Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad's
training as a painter, has most generously offered to receive him for
his own pupil. My father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed to
hesitate the first; but Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antony
visibly refines and beautifies his whole nature, has won the necessary
permission, and this dear young brother will leave us to-morrow. Our
regrets and his, at his parting from us for the first time, overtook
our joy at his good fortune by surprise, at the last moment, as we were
about to bid each other good-night. For a while there had seemed to be
an uneasiness under our cheerful talk, as if each one present were
concealing something with an effort; and it was Jean-Baptiste himself
who gave way at last. And then we sat down again, still together, and
allowed free play to what was in our hearts, almost till morning, my
sisters weeping much. I know better how to control myself. In a few
days that delightful new life will have begun for him: and I have made
him promise to write often to us. With how small a part of my whole
life shall I be really living at Valenciennes!
January 1714.
Jean-Philippe Watteau has received a letter from his son to-day. Old
Michelle Watteau, whose sight is failing, though she still works (half
by touch, indeed) at her pillow-lace, was glad to hear me read the
letter aloud more than once. It recounts--how modestly, and almost as a
matter of course!--his late successes. And yet!--does he, in writing to
these old people, purposely underrate his great good fortune and
seeming happiness, not to shock them too much by the contrast between
the delicate enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy and
refined, and that bald existence of theirs in his old home? A life,
agitated, exigent, unsatisfying! That is what this letter really
discloses, below so attractive a surface. As his gift expands so does
that incurable restlessness one supposed but the humour natural to a
promising youth who had still everything to do. And now the only
realised enjoyment he has of all this might seem to be the thought of
the independence it has purchased him, so that he can escape from one
lodging-place to another, just as it may please him. He has already
deserted, somewhat incontinently, more than one of those fine houses,
the liberal air of which he used so greatly to affect, and which have
so readily received him. Has he failed truly to grasp the fact of his
great success and the rewards that lie before him? At all events, he
seems, after all, not greatly to value that dainty world he is now
privileged to enter, and has certainly but little relish for his own
works--those works which I for one so thirst to see.
March 1714.
We were all--Jean-Philippe, Michelle Watteau, and ourselves--half in
expectation of a visit from Antony; and to-day, quite suddenly, he is
with us. I was lingering after early Mass this morning in the church of
Saint Vaast. It is good for me to be there. Our people lie under one of
the great marble slabs before the jube, some of the memorial brass
balusters of which are engraved with their names and the dates of their
decease. The settle of carved oak which runs all round the wide nave is
my father's own work. The quiet spaciousness of the place is itself
like a meditation, an "act of recollection," and clears away the
confusions of the heart. I suppose the heavy droning of the carillon
had smothered the sound of his footsteps, for on my turning round, when
I supposed myself alone, Antony Watteau was standing near me. Constant
observer as he is of the lights and shadows of things, he visits places
of this kind at odd times. He has left Jean-Baptiste at work in Paris,
and will stay this time with the old people, not at our house; though
he has spent the better part of to-day in my father's workroom. He
hasn't yet put off, in spite of all his late intercourse with the great
world, his distant and preoccupied manner--a manner, it is true, the
same to every one. It is certainly not through pride in his success, as
some might fancy, for he was thus always. It is rather as if, with all
that success, life and its daily social routine were somewhat of a
burden to him.
April 1714.
At last we shall understand something of that new style of his-the
Watteau style--so much relished by the fine people at Paris. He has
taken it into his kind head to paint and decorate our chief salon--the
room with the three long windows, which occupies the first floor of the
house.
The room was a landmark, as we used to think, an inviolable milestone
and landmark, of old Valenciennes fashion--that sombre style, indulging
much in contrasts of black or deep brown with white, which the
Spaniards left behind them here. Doubtless their eyes had found its
shadows cool and pleasant, when they shut themselves in from the
cutting sunshine of their own country. But in our country, where we
must needs economise not the shade but the sun, its grandiosity weighs
a little on one's spirits. Well! the rough plaster we used to cover as
well as might be with morsels of old figured arras-work, is replaced by
dainty panelling of wood, with mimic columns, and a quite aerial
scrollwork around sunken spaces of a pale-rose stuff and certain oval
openings--two over the doors, opening on each side of the great couch
which faces the windows, one over the chimney-piece, and one above the
buffet which forms its vis-a-vis--four spaces in all, to be filled by
and by with "fantasies" of the Four Seasons, painted by his own hand.
He will send us from Paris arm-chairs of a new pattern he has devised,
suitably covered, and a clavecin. Our old silver candlesticks look well
on the chimney-piece. Odd, faint-coloured flowers fill coquettishly the
little empty spaces here and there, like ghosts of nosegays left by
visitors long ago, which paled thus, sympathetically, at the decease of
their old owners; for, in spite of its new-fashionedness, all this
array is really less like a new thing than the last surviving result of
all the more lightsome adornments of past times. Only, the very walls
seem to cry out:--No! to make delicate insinuation, for a music, a
conversation, nimbler than any we have known, or are likely to find
here. For himself, he converses well, but very sparingly. He assures
us, indeed, that the "new style" is in truth a thing of old days, of
his own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as a
mason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house he
was employed in, with this fairy arrangement--itself like a piece of
"chamber-music," methinks, part answering to part; while no too
trenchant note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of
white and pale red and little golden touches. Yet it is all very
comfortable also, it must be confessed; with an elegant open place for
the fire, instead of the big old stove of brown tiles. The ancient,
heavy furniture of our grandparents goes up, with difficulty, into the
garrets, much against my father's inclination. To reconcile him to the
change, Antony is painting his portrait in a vast perruque and with
more vigorous massing of light and shadow than he is wont to permit
himself.
June 1714.
He has completed the ovals:--The Four Seasons. Oh! the summerlike
grace, the freedom and softness, of the "Summer"--a hayfield such as we
visited to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian
architecture in the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths of
flowers, fairy hayrakes and the like, suspended from tree to tree, with
that wonderful lightness which is one of the charms of his work. I can
understand through this, at last, what it is he enjoys, what he selects
by preference, from all that various world we pass our lives in. I am
struck by the purity of the room he has re-fashioned for us--a sort of
MORAL purity; yet, in the FORMS and COLOURS of things. Is the actual
life of Paris, to which he will soon return, equally pure, that it
relishes this kind of thing so strongly? Only, methinks 'tis a pity to
incorporate so much of his work, of himself, with objects of use, which
must perish by use, or disappear, like our own old furniture, with mere
change of fashion.
July 1714.
On the last day of Antony Watteau's visit we made a party to Cambrai.
We entered the cathedral church: it was the hour of Vespers, and it
happened that Monseigneur le Prince de Cambrai, the author of
Telemaque, was in his place in the choir. He appears to be of great
age, assists but rarely at the offices of religion, and is never to be
seen in Paris; and Antony had much desired to behold him. Certainly it
was worth while to have come so far only to see him, and hear him give
his pontifical blessing, in a voice feeble but of infinite sweetness,
and with an inexpressibly graceful movement of the hands. A veritable
grand seigneur! His refined old age, the impress of genius and honours,
even his disappointments, concur with natural graces to make him seem
too distinguished (a fitter word fails me) for this world. Omnia
vanitas! he seems to say, yet with a profound resignation, which makes
the things we are most of us so fondly occupied with look petty enough.
Omnia vanitas! Is that indeed the proper comment on our lives, coming,
as it does in this case, from one who might have made his own all that
life has to bestow? Yet he was never to be seen at court, and has lived
here almost as an exile. Was our "Great King Lewis" jealous of a true
grand seigneur or grand monarque by natural gift and the favour of
heaven, that he could not endure his presence?
July 1714.
My own portrait remains unfinished at his sudden departure. I sat for
it in a walking-dress, made under his direction--a gown of a peculiar
silken stuff, falling into an abundance of small folds, giving me "a
certain air of piquancy" which pleases him, but is far enough from my
true self. My old Flemish faille, which I shall always wear, suits me
better.
I notice that our good-hearted but sometimes difficult friend said
little of our brother Jean-Baptiste, though he knows us so anxious on
his account--spoke only of his constant industry, cautiously, and not
altogether with satisfaction, as if the sight of it wearied him.
September 1714.
Will Antony ever accomplish that long-pondered journey to Italy? For
his own sake, I should be glad he might. Yet it seems desolately far,
across those great hills and plains. I remember how I formed a plan for
providing him with a sum sufficient for the purpose. But that he no
longer needs.
With myself, how to get through time becomes sometimes the
question,--unavoidably; though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad
in a life so short as ours. The sullenness of a long wet day is
yielding just now to an outburst of watery sunset, which strikes from
the far horizon of this quiet world of ours, over fields and
willow-woods, upon the shifty weather-vanes and long-pointed windows of
the tower on the square--from which the Angelus is sounding-with a
momentary promise of a fine night. I prefer the Salut at Saint Vaast.
The walk thither is a longer one, and I have a fancy always that I may
meet Antony Watteau there again, any time; just as, when a child,
having found one day a tiny box in the shape of a silver coin, for long
afterwards I used to try every piece of money that came into my hands,
expecting it to open.
September 1714.
We were sitting in the Watteau chamber for the coolness, this sultry
evening. A sudden gust of wind ruffled the lights in the sconces on the
walls: the distant rumblings, which had continued all the afternoon,
broke out at last; and through the driving rain, a coach, rattling
across the Place, stops at our door: in a moment Jean-Baptiste is with
us once again; but with bitter tears in his eyes;--dismissed!
October 1714.
Jean-Baptiste! he too, rejected by Antony! It makes our friendship and
fraternal sympathy closer. And still as he labours, not less sedulously
than of old, and still so full of loyalty to his old master, in that
Watteau chamber, I seem to see Antony himself, of whom Jean-Baptiste
dares not yet speak,--to come very near his work, and understand his
great parts. So Jean-Baptiste's work, in its nearness to his, may
stand, for the future, as the central interest of my life. I bury
myself in that.
February 1715.
If I understand anything of these matters, Antony Watteau paints that
delicate life of Paris so excellently, with so much spirit, partly
because, after all, he looks down upon it or despises it. To persuade
myself of that, is my womanly satisfaction for his preference--his
apparent preference--for a world so different from mine. Those
coquetries, those vain and perishable graces, can be rendered so
perfectly, only through an intimate understanding of them. For him, to
understand must be to despise them; while (I think I know why) he
nevertheless undergoes their fascination. Hence that discontent with
himself, which keeps pace with his fame. It would have been better for
him--he would have enjoyed a purer and more real happiness--had he
remained here, obscure; as it might have been better for me!
It is altogether different with Jean-Baptiste. He approaches that life,
and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own;
and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain, produces
a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways.
March 1715.
There are points in his painting (I apprehend this through his own
persistently modest observations) at which he works out his purpose
more excellently than Watteau; of whom he has trusted himself to speak
at last, with a wonderful self-effacement, pointing out in each of his
pictures, for the rest so just and true, how Antony would have managed
this or that, and, with what an easy superiority, have done the thing
better--done the impossible.
February 1716.
There are good things, attractive things, in life, meant for one and
not for another--not meant perhaps for me; as there are pretty clothes
which are not suitable for every one. I find a certain immobility of
disposition in me, to quicken or interfere with which is like physical
pain. He, so brilliant, petulant, mobile! I am better far beside
Jean-Baptiste--in contact with his quiet, even labour, and manner of
being. At first he did the work to which he had set himself, sullenly;
but the mechanical labour of it has cleared his mind and temper at
last, as a sullen day turns quite clear and fine by imperceptible
change. With the earliest dawn he enters his workroom, the Watteau
chamber, where he remains at work all day. The dark evenings he spends
in industrious preparation with the crayon for the pictures he is to
finish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his amusement: he
goes but rarely into the society whose manners he has to re-produce.
The animals in his pictures, pet animals, are mere toys: he knows it.
But he finishes a large number of works, door-heads, clavecin cases,
and the like. His happiest, his most genial moments, he puts, like
savings of fine gold, into one particular picture (true opus magnum, as
he hopes), The Swing. He has the secret of surprising effects with a
certain pearl-grey silken stuff of his predilection; and it must be
confessed that he paints hands--which a draughtsman, of course, should
understand at least twice as well other people--with surpassing
expression.
March 1716.
Is it the depressing result of this labour, of a too exacting labour? I
know not. But at times (it is his one melancholy!) he expresses a
strange apprehension of poverty, of penury and mean surroundings in old
age; reminding me of that childish disposition to hoard, which I
noticed in him of old. And then--inglorious Watteau, as he is!--at
times that steadiness, in which he is so great a contrast to Antony, as
it were accumulates, changes, into a ray of genius, a grace, an
inexplicable touch of truth, in which all his heaviness leaves him for
a while, and he actually goes beyond the master; as himself protests to
me, yet modestly. And still, it is precisely at those moments that he
feels most the difference between himself and Antony Watteau. "In THAT
country, ALL the pebbles are golden nuggets," he says; with perfect
good-humour.
June 1716.
'Tis truly in a delightful abode that Antony Watteau is just now
lodged--the hotel or town-house of M. de Crozat, which is not only a
comfortable dwelling-place, but also a precious museum lucky people go
far to see. Jean-Baptiste, too, has seen the place, and describes it.
The antiquities, beautiful curiosities of all sorts--above all, the
original drawings of those old masters Antony so greatly admires-are
arranged all around one there, that the influence, the genius, of those
things may imperceptibly play upon and enter into one, and form what
one does. The house is situated near the Rue Richelieu, but has a large
garden bout it. M. de Crozat gives his musical parties there, and
Antony Watteau has painted the walls of one of the apartments with the
Four Seasons, after the manner of ours, but doubtless improved by
second thoughts. This beautiful place is now Antony's home for a while.
The house has but one story, with attics in the mansard roofs, like
those of a farmhouse in the country. I fancy Antony fled thither for a
few moments, from the visitors who weary him; breathing the freshness
of that dewy garden in the very midst of Paris. As for me, I suffocate
this summer afternoon in this pretty Watteau chamber of ours, where
Jean-Baptiste is at work so contentedly.
May 1717.
In spite of all that happened, Jean-Baptiste has been looking forward
to a visit to Valenciennes which Antony Watteau had proposed to make.
He hopes always--has a patient hope--that Antony's former patronage of
him may be revived. And now he is among us, actually at his
work-restless and disquieting, meagre, like a woman with some nervous
malady. Is it pity, then, pity only, one must feel for the brilliant
one? He has been criticising the work of Jean-Baptiste, who takes his
judgments generously, gratefully. Can it be that, after all, he
despises and is no true lover of his own art, and is but chilled by an
enthusiasm for it in another, such as that of Jean-Baptiste? as if
Jean-Baptiste over-valued it, or as if some ignobleness or blunder,
some sign that he has really missed his aim, started into sight from
his work at the sound of praise--as if such praise could hardly be
altogether sincere.
June 1717.
And at last one has actual sight of his work--what it is. He has
brought with him certain long-cherished designs to finish here in
quiet, as he protests he has never finished before. That charming
Noblesse--can it be really so distinguished to the minutest point, so
naturally aristocratic? Half in masquerade, playing the drawing-room or
garden comedy of life, these persons have upon them, not less than the
landscape he composes, and among the accidents of which they group
themselves with such a perfect fittingness, a certain light we should
seek for in vain upon anything real. For their framework they have
around them a veritable architecture--a tree-architecture--to which
those moss-grown balusters, termes, statues, fountains, are really but
accessories. Only, as I gaze upon those windless afternoons, I find
myself always saying to myself involuntarily, "The evening will be a
wet one." The storm is always brooding through the massy splendour of
the trees, above those sun-dried glades or lawns, where delicate
children may be trusted thinly clad; and the secular trees themselves
will hardly outlast another generation.
July 1717.
There has been an exhibition of his pictures in the Hall of the Academy
of Saint Luke; and all the world has been to see.
Yes! Besides that unreal, imaginary light upon these scenes, these
persons, which is pure gift of his, there was a light, a poetry, in
those persons and things themselves, close at hand WE had not seen. He
has enabled us to see it: we are so much the better-off thereby, and I,
for one, the better. The world he sets before us so engagingly has its
care for purity, its cleanly preferences, in what one is to SEE--in the
outsides of things-and there is something, a sign, a memento, at the
least, of what makes life really valuable, even in that. There, is my
simple notion, wholly womanly perhaps, but which I may hold by, of the
purpose of the arts.
August 1717.
And yet! (to read my mind, my experience, in somewhat different terms)
methinks Antony Watteau reproduces that gallant world, those patched
and powdered ladies and fine cavaliers, so much to its own
satisfaction, partly because he despises it; if this be a possible
condition of excellent artistic production. People talk of a new era
now dawning upon the world, of fraternity, liberty, humanity, of a
novel sort of social freedom in which men's natural goodness of heart
will blossom at a thousand points hitherto repressed, of wars
disappearing from the world in an infinite, benevolent ease of
life--yes! perhaps of infinite littleness also. And it is the outward
manner of that, which, partly by anticipation, and through pure
intellectual power, Antony Watteau has caught, together with a
flattering something of his own, added thereto. Himself really of the
old time--that serious old time which is passing away, the impress of
which he carries on his physiognomy--he dignifies, by what in him is
neither more nor less than a profound melancholy, the essential
insignificance of what he wills to touch in all that, transforming its
mere pettiness into grace. It looks certainly very graceful, fresh,
animated, "piquant," as they love to say--yes! and withal, I repeat,
perfectly pure, and may well congratulate itself on the loan of a
fallacious grace, not its own. For in truth Antony Watteau is still the
mason's boy, and deals with that world under a fascination, of the
nature of which he is half-conscious methinks, puzzled at "the queer
trick he possesses," to use his own phrase. You see him growing ever
more and more meagre, as he goes through the world and its applause.
Yet he reaches with wonderful sagacity the secret of an adjustment of
colours, a coiffure, a toilette, setting I know not what air of real
superiority on such things. He will never overcome his early training;
and these light things will possess for him always a kind of
representative or borrowed worth, as characterising that impossible or
forbidden world which the mason's boy saw through the closed gateways
of the enchanted garden. Those trifling and petty graces, the insignia
to him of that nobler world of aspiration and idea, even now that he is
aware, as I conceive, of their true littleness, bring back to him, by
the power of association, all the old magical exhilaration of his
dream--his dream of a better world than the real one. There, is the
formula, as I apprehend, of his success--of his extraordinary hold on
things so alien from himself. And I think there is more real hilarity
in my brother's fetes champetres--more truth to life, and therefore
less distinction. Yes! The world profits by such reflection of its
poor, coarse self, in one who renders all its caprices from the height
of a Corneille. That is my way of making up to myself for the fact that
I think his days, too, would have been really happier, had he remained
obscure at Valenciennes.
September 1717.
My own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished on
the easel, at his departure from Valenciennes--perhaps for ever; since
the old people departed this life in the hard winter of last year, at
no distant time from each other. It is pleasanter to him to sketch and
plan than to paint and finish; and he is often out of humour with
himself because he cannot project into a picture the life and spirit of
his first thought with the crayon. He would fain begin where that
famous master Gerard Dow left off, and snatch, as it were with a single
stroke, what in him was the result of infinite patience. It is the sign
of this sort of promptitude that he values solely in the work of
another. To my thinking there is a kind of greed or grasping in that
humour; as if things were not to last very long, and one must snatch
opportunity. And often he succeeds. The old Dutch painter cherished
with a kind of piety his colours and pencils. Antony Watteau, on the
contrary, will hardly make any preparations for his work at all, or
even clean his palette, in the dead-set he makes at improvisation. 'Tis
the contrast perhaps between the staid Dutch genius and the petulant,
sparkling French temper of this new era, into which he has thrown
himself. Alas! it is already apparent that the result also loses
something of longevity, of durability--the colours fading or changing,
from the first, somewhat rapidly, as Jean-Baptiste notes. 'Tis true, a
mere trifle alters or produces the expression. But then, on the other
hand, in pictures the whole effect of which lies in a kind of harmony,
the treachery of a single colour must needs involve the failure of the
whole to outlast the fleeting grace of those social conjunctions it is
meant to perpetuate. This is what has happened, in part, to that
portrait on the easel. Meantime, he has commanded Jean-Baptiste to
finish it; and so it must be.
October 1717.
Antony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been
reading (with infinite surprise!) in my afternoon walks in the little
wood here, a new book he left behind him--a great favourite of his; as
it has been a favourite with large numbers in Paris.* Those pathetic
shocks of fortune, those sudden alternations of pleasure and remorse,
which must always lie among the very conditions of an irregular and
guilty love, as in sinful games of chance:--they have begun to talk of
these things in Paris, to amuse themselves with the spectacle of them,
set forth here, in the story of poor Manon Lescaut--for whom fidelity
is impossible, vulgarly eager for the money which can buy pleasures,
such as hers--with an art like Watteau's own, for lightness and grace.
Incapacity of truth, yet with such tenderness, such a gift of tears, on
the one side: on the other, a faith so absolute as to give to an
illicit love almost the regularity of marriage! And this is the book
those fine ladies in Watteau's "conversations," who look so exquisitely
pure, lay down on the cushion when the children run up to have their
laces righted. Yet the pity of it! What floods of weeping! There is a
tone about which strikes me as going well with the grace of these
leafless birch-trees against the sky, the pale silver of their bark,
and a certain delicate odour of decay which rises from the soil. It is
all one half-light; and the heroine, nay! The hero himself also, that
dainty Chevalier des Grieux, with all his fervour, have, I think, but a
half-life in them truly, from the first. And I could fancy myself
almost of their condition sitting here alone this evening, in which a
premature touch of winter makes the world look but an inhospitable
place of entertainment for one's spirit. With so little genial warmth
to hold it there, one feels that the merest accident might detach that
flighty guest altogether. So chilled at heart things seem to me, as I
gaze on that glacial point in the motionless sky, like some mortal spot
whence death begins to creep over the body!
*Possibly written at this date, but almost certainly not printed till
many years later.--Note in Second Edition.
And yet, in the midst of this, by mere force of contrast, comes back to
me, very vividly, the true colour, ruddy with blossom and fruit, of the
past summer, among the streets and gardens of some of our old towns we
visited; when the thought of cold was a luxury, and the earth dry
enough to sleep on. The summer was indeed a fine one; and the whole
country seemed bewitched. A kind of infectious sentiment passed upon
us, like an efflux from its flowers and flowerlike
architecture--flower-like to me at least, but of which I never felt the
beauty before.
And as I think of that, certainly I have to confess that there is a
wonderful reality about this lovers' story; an accordance between
themselves and the conditions of things around them, so deep as to make
it seem that the course of their lives could hardly have been other
than it was. That impression comes, perhaps, wholly of the writer's
skill; but, at all events, I must read the book no more.
June 1718.
And he has allowed that Mademoiselle Rosalba--"ce bel esprit"--who can
discourse upon the arts like a master, to paint his portrait: has
painted hers in return! She holds a lapful of white roses with her two
hands. Rosa Alba--himself has inscribed it! It will be engraved, to
circulate and perpetuate it the better.
One's journal, here in one's solitude, is of service at least in this,
that it affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience. One
puts this and that angry spasm into it, and is delivered from it so.
And then, it was at the desire of M. de Crozat that the thing was done.
One must oblige one's patrons. The lady also, they tell me, is
consumptive, like Antony himself, and like to die. And he, who has
always lacked either the money or the spirits to make that
long-pondered, much-desired journey to Italy, has found in her work the
veritable accent and colour of those old Venetian masters he would so
willingly have studied under the sunshine of their own land. Alas! How
little peace have his great successes given him; how little of that
quietude of mind, without which, methinks, one fails in true dignity of
character.
November 1718.
His thirst for change of place has actually driven him to England, that
veritable home of the consumptive. Ah me! I feel it may be the
finishing stroke. To have run into the native country of consumption!
Strange caprice of that desire to travel, which he has really indulged
so little in his life--of the restlessness which, they tell me, is
itself a symptom of this terrible disease!
January 1720.
As once before, after long silence, a token has reached us, a slight
token that he remembers--an etched plate, one of very few he has
executed, with that old subject: Soldiers on the March. And the weary
soldier himself is returning once more to Valenciennes, on his way from
England to Paris.
February 1720.
Those sharply-arched brows, those restless eyes which seem larger than
ever--something that seizes on one, and is almost terrible, in his
expression--speak clearly, and irresistibly set one on the thought of a
summing-up of his life. I am reminded of the day when, already with
that air of seemly thought, le bel serieux, he was found sketching,
with so much truth to the inmost mind in them, those picturesque
mountebanks at the Fair in the Grande Place; and I find, throughout his
course of life, something of the essential melancholy of the comedian.
He, so fastidious and cold, and who has never "ventured the
representation of passion," does but amuse the gay world; and is aware
of that, though certainly unamused himself all the while. Just now,
however, he is finishing a very different picture--that too, full of
humour--an English family-group, with a little girl riding a wooden
horse: the father, and the mother holding his tobacco-pipe, stand in
the centre.
March 1720.
To-morrow he will depart finally. And this evening the Syndics of the
Academy of Saint Luke came with their scarves and banners to conduct
their illustrious fellow-citizen, by torchlight, to supper in their
Guildhall, where all their beautiful old corporation plate will be
displayed. The Watteau salon was lighted up to receive them. There is
something in the payment of great honours to the living which fills one
with apprehension, especially when the recipient of them looks so like
a dying man. God have mercy on him!
April 1721.
We were on the point of retiring to rest last evening when a messenger
arrived post-haste with a letter on behalf of Antony Watteau, desiring
Jean-Baptiste's presence at Paris. We did not go to bed that night; and
my brother was on his way before daylight, his heart full of a strange
conflict of joy and apprehension.
May 1721.
A letter at last! from Jean-Baptiste, occupied with cares of all sorts
at the bedside of the sufferer. Antony fancying that the air of the
country might do him good, the Abbe Haranger, one of the canons of the
Church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, where he was in the habit of
hearing Mass, has lent him a house at Nogent-sur-Marne. There he
receives a few visitors. But in truth the places he once liked best,
the people, nay! the very friends, have become to him nothing less than
insupportable. Though he still dreams of change, and would fain try his
native air once more, he is at work constantly upon his art; but solely
by way of a teacher, instructing (with a kind of remorseful diligence,
it would seem) Jean-Baptiste, who will be heir to his unfinished work,
and take up many of his pictures where he has left them. He seems now
anxious for one thing only, to give his old "dismissed" disciple what
remains of himself and the last secrets of his genius. His
property--9000 livres only--goes to his relations. Jean-Baptiste has
found these last weeks immeasurably useful.
For the rest, bodily exhaustion perhaps, and this new interest in an
old friend, have brought him tranquillity at last, a tranquillity in
which he is much occupied with matters of religion. Ah! it was ever so
with me. And one lives also most reasonably so.--With women, at least,
it is thus, quite certainly. Yet I know not what there is of a pity
which strikes deep, at the thought of a man, a while since so strong,
turning his face to the wall from the things which most occupy men's
lives. 'Tis that homely, but honest cure of Nogent he has caricatured
so often, who attends him.
July 1721.
Our incomparable Watteau is no more! Jean-Baptiste returned
unexpectedly. I heard his hasty footsteps on the stairs. We turned
together into that room; and he told his story there. Antony Watteau
departed suddenly, in the arms of M. Gersaint, on one of the late hot
days of July. At the last moment he had been at work upon a crucifix
for the good cure of Nogent, liking little the very rude one he
possessed. He died with all the sentiments of religion.
He has been a sick man all his life. He was always a seeker after
something in the world that is there in no satisfying measure, or not
at all.