Ver.07/27/01*END*
Produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
IMAGINARY PORTRAITS
By WALTER HORATIO PATER
E-text Editor: Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
Electronic Version 1.0 / Date 10-12-01
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CONTENTS
I. A Prince of Court Painters: 3-44
II. Denys L’Auxerrois: 45-77
III. Sebastian Van Storck: 79-115
IV. Duke Carl of Rosenmold: 117-153
IMAGINARY PORTRAITS
I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL
Valenciennes, September 1701.
[5] 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 work-
people 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 Hôtel de Ville, sketching the scene
to the life, but with a [6] 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, [7] 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 [8] 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 1702.
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
[9] 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. Métayer 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. [10] He receives three livres a week for his pains, and his
soup daily.
May 1705.
Antony Watteau has parted from the dealer in pictures à bon marché,
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 stiff 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 Départ de Troupes, Soldiers
Departing--one of those scenes of military life one can study so well
here at Valenciennes.
[11]
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 almost 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 sérieux-
-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 [12] 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.
[13]
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 brass-work, 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 [14] 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 [15]
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 King 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 great world, that Antony Watteau had been
elected to the Academy of Painting under the new title of Peintre des
Fêtes Galantes, and had been named also Peintre du Roi. My brother,
[16] 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 Abbé 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 hôtels, 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, [17] 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 at 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, just 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 [18] 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 [19] 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 jubé, 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 [20] 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, [21]
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-
à-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 painted 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 [22] "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 [23]
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
Télémaque, 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 [24] 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, [25] 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.
[26]
September 1714.
We were sitting in the Watteau chamber for the coolness, this sultry
evening. A sudden gust of wind ruffed 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
[27] 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 [28] 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, [29] 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 as all 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.
[30]
June 1716.
'Tis truly in a delightful abode that Antony Watteau is just now
lodged--the hôtel, 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 about 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.
[31]
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 Anthony'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 [32] 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 [33] 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 [34]--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 [35] 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 fêtes champêtres--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 work of another. To my thinking there is a [36] 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.
Anthony Watteau is an excellent judge of literature, and I have been
reading (with infinite [37] 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, so 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
it 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 [38] 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!
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 flower-like
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 [39] 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
[40] 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.