Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World

Book by Perl Jed

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Actors. For Watteau, life is a casting call, an audition, a rehearsal, a coaching session, an intermission, an opening-night party, a day spent in idleness after the play has shut down. Although Watteau’s paintings are saturated with the life of the theater—with figures in theatrical costumes, with theatrical gestures, with richly decorated porticoes and loggias that suggest the contained world of the stage—the more I look at his paintings, the more forcibly it’s brought to mind how few of his characters are actually onstage. The strictly delimited world of the stage is too readily comprehensible to really interest Watteau. An actor on a stage is a personality, a figure, and Watteau is fascinated, above all else, by the impossibility of ever being sure of who you are, at least for more than a very brief time. He is a master of in-between situations, less interested in life as a stage than in the preparations for going onstage, or how actors feel after they’ve made their exits. It’s not the performer in performance so much as the mentality of the performer that fascinates him. He’s obsessed with maskings and unmaskings, with grand gestures and whispered asides, with the moment of disarming honesty that is set in sharp contrast to the actor’s generally armored personality. And he views such behavior—the histrionics and the feints, the approaches and the withdrawals—not as characteristic of actors in particular but as typical of men and women in general.

Antony. At the time of his death in 1721 at the age of thirty-six, Watteau was a famous figure in Paris, with his share of devoted friends. The nuggets of reliable information about his life, however, are few and far between, so that every attempt to construct a biography from what scattered facts there are appears bound to fail. In accounts of Watteau’s life, the artist himself is always at best caught in the process of disappearing from view, and it is the genius of Walter Pater’s portrait of Watteau, “A Prince of Court Painters,” that in assembling and readjusting some of the facts of the artist’s life, this English essayist whose work is at once so luxuriant and so severe, constructs a fable about Watteau that is truer to what we feel when we’re looking at his paintings and drawings than a more straightforward account could possibly be. Published in 1885 in Macmillan’s Magazine and later included in the collection Imaginary Portraits, Pater’s essay is a masterpiece of oblique storytelling. By relating the triumphs of Watteau’s Parisian career from the vantage point of a childhood friend, a young woman who remains in what amounts to the backstage or offstage world of Watteau’s hometown of Valenciennes in northeastern France, Pater imagines Watteau himself as the archetypal in-between figure. For Marie-Marguerite, the narrator of the story, this man whom she knows as Antony and with whom she has been in love since they were children appears to be at home neither in the Valenciennes that he left to make his fortune and to which he occasionally returns nor in the glittery Parisian world that Marie-Marguerite can barely comprehend.

Pater’s portrait, subtitled “Extracts from an Old French Journal,” is a craftily constructed story, and not the least of the craft has to do with the fact that Pater’s fictional journal keeper was also a real person whose surname happened to be Pater. Marie-Marguerite was the daughter of the Valenciennes sculptor Antoine Pater, who was a friend of Watteau’s. Marie-Marguerite, in Walter Pater’s telling, is watchful, discriminating, gently sentimental, fiercely insightful, a bit of a goody-goody, a bit of a priss. She is far too passionate and intelligent to be satisfied with the quiet life of Valenciennes, and as if in compensation, she has developed an almost frightening sensitivity to the moods of others, a sensitivity that mixes acute intuition with a certain degree of delusion, for to her the Parisian women who fascinate Watteau cannot be anything but poetic nincompoops. Marie-Marguerite is, of course, mostly an invention of Pater’s, but her younger brother, Jean-Baptiste, was indeed a student and follower of Watteau’s. And there is no question that Walter Pater savored the thought that he was writing the journal of another Pater, who was in turn writing the story of Watteau’s life, for it is reported that when the essayist was asked if he was related to Marie- Marguerite’s brother, the painter Jean-Baptiste, he said, “I think so; I believe so; I always say so.” Thus while Marie-Marguerite longs to love Watteau, Pater imagines himself as a part of the eighteenth- century Pater family that actually knew Watteau. Pater’s “A Prince of Court Painters” is something of a Chinese box construction, with Pater’s late-nineteenth-century essay, a triumph of fin de siècle delicacy, enclosing the fictional journal of a heartbroken young woman, which in turn encloses the life of Watteau.

The extraordinary arc of Watteau’s life, from his beginnings in Valenciennes to his death from tuberculosis near Paris in 1721, is told in a series of journal entries. Marie-Marguerite’s unrequited love for Watteau has given her the ability, or so she believes, to understand him better than anybody else. And the Watteau about whom she dreams is very much the figure that we know from a portrait drawn by another eighteenth-century painter, François Boucher. The tilt of Watteau’s head and the quick, glancing eyes give him the look of a man who thinks of himself as handsome and alluring in spite of the rather awkward way that his features fit in his large, somewhat fleshy face. Although there is dark poetry in his enormous eyes and aristocratic aggression in his long, sharp nose, there’s also a dose of middle-class matter-of-factness in this man who appears small, almost childlike, with his large head set on narrow shoulders. His long, curly hair flows straight into the furry edges of his coat, and the coat in turn leads us toward his hands, so animated as to seem nervous, the left one resting on a portfolio, the right one holding a stylus that contains the colored chalk with which he did his innumerable drawings.

Marie-Marguerite imagines that Watteau has remained the self- contained adolescent she knew, and she consoles herself in her disappointment at his lack of attentiveness by convincing herself that he can get along with nobody. When her brother, who has gone to study with Watteau in Paris, is ultimately turned out and returns to Valenciennes “with bitter tears in his eyes;—dismissed!” she cannot help feeling consoled. “Jean-Baptiste!” she writes in her journal, “he too, rejected by Antony! It makes our friendship and fraternal sympathy closer.” A few months earlier, on one of his rare returns to Valenciennes, Watteau had begun a portrait of Marie-Marguerite. But three years later the portrait is still not finished—“my own poor likeness, begun so long ago, still remains unfinished on the easel.” She justifies this to herself by considering that “it is pleasanter to him to sketch and plan than to paint and finish.” Then she is crushed when it turns out that he has finished a portrait of another woman, Mademoiselle Rosalba, a well-known painter. “She holds a lapful of white roses with her two hands,” Marie-Marguerite writes, going on to observe that this painting “will be engraved, to circulate and perpetuate it the better.” Watteau’s portrait of this woman whom Marie-Marguerite somehow regards as a rival—a portrait that has been finished and will be engraved—is a terrible blow, so that Marie-Marguerite turns ever more obsessively to her journal, which at least, as she puts it, “affords an escape for vain regrets, angers, impatience.”

What Marie-Marguerite views as Watteau’s rejection of her may well be something closer to indifference, but whatever his thoughts are about her, she comes to believe that something in the style of the work with which he has made his great reputation in Paris is “at variance, methinks, with his own singular gravity and even sadness of mien and mind.” Watteau, according to Marie-Marguerite, “seems, after all, not greatly to value that dainty world he is now privileged to enter.” “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.” She consoles herself for his lack of interest in her by imagining that “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’s as if she sees her own whimpering disappointment reflected in the equivocations of his enchanted figures. And, indeed, her neurotic infatuation with his aloofness goes back to the first years when she knew him, for when she wrote of his drawings in a journal entry in 1701, he was already fully formed, at least so she believed. She had seen him at the time of a fair, “hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old Hôtel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace—a marvelous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one’s own window.” He had “made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine seem like people in some fairyland.” That was his fascination, but it was a confounding fascination, because Marie-Marguerite, despite all her refinements, was part of the vulgar reality of Valenciennes.

This bright, good, pious girl wants Antony to be like her. The day after he’s ended one of his visits to Valenciennes, Marie-Marguerite is at early mass; she watches ...