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AN UNKNOWN WATTEAU

BY CLAUDE PHILLIPS

HIS title is perhaps not quite accurate as a description of the picture which it is desired now to introduce to the readers of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE and to the public.1 In my monograph on Antoine Watteau, published in June 1895, as No. 18 in the Portfolio series, I referred to it shortly as follows: 'A Fête Champêtre,belonging to the same class as the foregoing series of works (i.e., that of the Accordée de Village, the Signature du Contrat, and the Mariée de Village), and consisting, like these pictures, of groups of small figures, gem-like in colouring, partly overshadowed by the dark masses of noble trees, is in the collection of Colonel Edward Browell, R.A., at Woolwich. This painting appears to have hitherto escaped the engraver and the cataloguer ; yet, in the opinion of the writer, who has seen and examined it carefully, it is beyond reasonable doubt genuine.' The Fête Champêtre in question remained undisturbed in Colonel Browell's collection, save that it was removed to his country residence, Guise House, Aspley Guise, in Bedfordshire. It should be mentioned that it can be traced back to the collection of his great-grandfather, and that it has thus been without interruption in the possession of his family for at least a hundred and thirty years. The short description included in my monograph does not appear to have attracted the attention of any other student of the master, and the picture dropped out of view again until some few months ago it was brought up to London by the owner to undergo a careful process of cleaning and revarnishing. I then had the canvas in my possession for a considerable time, and was absolutely confirmed in my estimate of it as a genuine Watteau of the earlier but not the earliest time, and a work charac1 See page 230 (frontispiece)

teristically imaginative in treatment and of singular beauty. It has during its villégiature of nearly a century and a half suffered considerably from the 'irreparable outrages of time,' and something too from the hand of those who have sacrilegiously sought to repair and conceal these irreparable inroads. Still, pictures by the 'prince of court painters,' as Walter Pater, aptly in one way, but in another most inappropriately, styled the short-lived and ill-fated master of Valenciennes, are not to be found in every country house, or in every gallery. We may well treasure this one, shorn though it is of its full beauty, and deem it an important addition to the authentic works which make up his œuvre-crowded, all of it that survives and lives, into a few short years. Its condition might be styled excellent by comparison with that of the ruined but still beautiful Accordée de Village in the Soane Collection, or the Mariée de Village, which, even as a wreck, is reckoned one of the chief ornaments of the palace of Sans-Souci at Potsdam. It is far better than that of many Watteaus exhibited, and very properly exhibited, in the La Caze section of the Louvre; better than that of Le Faux Pas, or L'Automne, or Le Jugement de Paris; as good, on the whole, as that of the beautiful Promenade dans un Parc. Colonel Browell's Fête Champêtre or more accurately Wedding Festivities-has not, so far as I have been able to ascertain, been engraved, whether in M. de Julienne's colossal recueil, 'L'Euvre d'Antoine Watteau, Peintre du Roy en son Académie Royale,' published in 1734, thirteen years after his death, or elsewhere. But this need not in the least prejudice the student and lover of Watteau's art against it. The great majority of pieces due to the brush of this most exquisite of all small masters' were no doubt so engraved, and included in the magnificent recueil of Julienne. Still, a great number

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of canvases, and among them some of the most famous, are not so included. Watteau's masterpiece, the Embarquement pour Cythère, of the Louvre, being only the sketch or preparation for the far more highly elaborated Embarquement now in the German Emperor's private apartments in the Berlin Schloss, is not engraved. The great Gilles of the La Caze collection in the Louvre, though it stood alone in the painter's life-work, occupied no burin or point of the eighteenth century. No contemporary or slightly posterior print exists of La Toilette du Matin at Hertford House, of Le Jugement de Paris or L'Automne in the La Caze collection of the Louvre, or, so far as I can ascertain, of the Jupiter et Antiope in the same section of the Paris museum. Les Fiançailles, in the Prado gallery at Madrid a work of precisely the period which we are now discussing-like our picture found no engraver in its own century.

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Colonel Browell's Wedding Festivities, probably the first in order of date of Watteau's quasi-pastoral fantasies of the Fête Champêtre order, belongs to the cial group of pictures which includes the above-mentioned Les Fiançailles and L'Accordée de Village, of which last-named composition, besides the engraved picture in the Soane Museum, there exist original variations which are, or were, respectively in the Alfred de Rothschild collection, in the now dispersed collection of Mrs. Broadwood, and in that of a Parisian amateur who contributed his possession to the recent exhibition of eighteenth-century art held at Brussels.2 To this same group belong the ruined Mariée de Village, of Potsdam, just now mentioned, and-most elaborate work of all in this peculiar earlymiddle style of Watteau's-the picture (engraved by Ant. Cardin) now in the collection of the duc d'Arenberg, which Edmond de Goncourt in his Catalogue

2 See BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, No. XII, Vol. IV, p. 219. This version has not been seen by the writer.

Raisonné' designates as 'La Signature du Contrat de la Noce de Village.' This group, in my opinion, comes midway between the early military pieces, with their strong, brown-grey, almost monochromatic tonality, the pieces more or less in the style of David Teniers the younger and the Dutchmen-as, for example, La Vraie Gaieté,3 now in the collection of Sir Charles Tennant, in Grosvenor Square, and La Cuisinière, not long ago added to the gallery of Strassburg -and the final efflorescence of the style, as it shows itself in the full-dress pastorals, in the Commedia dell' Arte pieces, the dainty modish Conversations galantes, and those quaint fantasies in which the stage-picture and the dreamland of poesy imperceptibly merge the one into the other-as in the lost Fêtes au Dieu Pan and the incomparable Embarquement pour Cythère of the Louvre. In the group of works which now engages our attention the influence of the Venetians -of Giorgione and the pastoral painters on the one hand, of Paolo Veronese on the other has not yet made itself felt to any great extent, if at all. The masters chiefly studied and assimilated have been Rubens, for colour and for the illumination and disposition of landscape; Teniers, and, it may be, Adriaen van Ostade, for the placing and moving of large groups of small figures. The local colour flashes in certain passages pure, deep-glowing, and gem-like; the general tonality is deep and rich, full of luminosity and vibration. The painting is curiously unequal: of wonderful dexterity, finish, and accent in some passages, but, irrespective of injury, hasty, à peu près, and imperfect in others. The beautiful landscape, with its improbable castles and its trees issuing from nowhere, is manifestly in a great measure painted de chic. The delightfully naïve little groups figures, often so true and rhythmic in gesture and movement, may not at other times be defended with entire success against the

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solemn censure of Jean-François Millet, who, branding these little denizens of Noman's-land as marionnettes, fails to perceive that in their unreality, in their half dolllike, half dream-like character, lies a rare and penetrating pathos sui generis, which belongs to Watteau and to no one else. Colonel Browell's Wedding Festivities is in one main respect distinguishable, in style and conception, from the kindred works of the group into which it fits. reveals to a far greater extent than do any of these the influence of a Netherlandish master whose name is not often pronounced in connection with that of Watteau-the influence of Rembrandt himself as a chiaroscurist. The almost horizontal rays of the setting sun piercing through the curtain of the trees, and for the moment immaterializing the pretty groups of gallants and ladies which they envelop, concentrate themselves with a well-nigh startling intensity on the central assemblage, with its lightly, brightly dressed pairs of loversofficially affianced, as their smartness suggests—and its old dame dividing them, and at the same time by her presence consecrating their union. This method of illumination recalls many of Rembrandt's pictures, and still more closely some of his most famous prints. Not less suggestive of his art are the large spaces of luminous dark which half enwrap enwrap the groups of the foreground and the triad of village musicians in the middle distance, allowing here and there a glowing fire of richest colour to smoulder, or frankly emerge. Particularly characteristic of Watteau is the treatment of the trees. They spread themselves out fan-like almost entirely on the same plane, branching forth, in a decorative pattern that does not cease to be true to nature, against the sunset glow and the vibrant clearness of an evening sky. This style of tree-drawing and painting is, with some variation and development, maintained to the end. Treetrunks and branches, treated as they are in

An Unknown Watteau

Colonel Browell's Wedding Festivities, are to be seen in the beautiful Amour Paisible, of Potsdam, and in the much elaborated Embarquement pour Cythère, of Berlin. The delightful group of youths and maidens dancing à la ronde in the left corner of our picture recalls in movement the Vraie Gaieté in Sir Charles Tennant's collection; but with a difference. We forget wholly the coarse merriment of Teniers and Adriaen van Ostade, of which in the other picture Watteau gives a tempered and enfeebled reflection. Here is the charm of wistfulness, the deep pathos underlying golden light and summer joys, youth and beauty and bubbling gaiety that have their golden moment, and then vanish into darkness. There is no death's head shown at the feast or the frolic, no direct suggestion of war's alarms, or the earnest morrow to follow close upon the day of light-hearted gladness. Nothing sadder than happy old age, sunning itself in the dying rays, consoled by the sight of youth's buoyant delight, by the blossoming everywhere of love and hope! There is no conscious arrière pensée. Indeed, there never any such pointing a moral in Watteau's work, early or late. And yet it is just this mysterious element that divides the Valenciennes master's pensive pastoral, his conversation galante, his scenic and poetic fantasia, from the piquant, the rather acid gaieties of a Lancret and the empty joys of a Pater-iridescent as the soap-bubble, and not much more solid or enduring. Here, in Colonel Browell's early picture, we have not yet the assimilation of the Giorgionesque pastoral, with its moment of delicious pause from passion and the strenuous delights of sense that go with it. Not yet have those fresher, brighter chords of colour-harmony been imagined which will be suggested by Paolo Veronese. We have a more glowing richness, more strong and trenchant contrasts of chiaroscuro, a more deliberate focussing of light, a conception more simple and artless in its true and naïve

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rusticity. The composition in its cunning and seemingly effortless linking together of many groups and many elements is one of the happiest to be found in the life-work of the master, who in the earlier section of his short career has hardly produced anything of a higher charm than this picture.

For all its unpretending character, it has still-it once had in a far higher degreethe essential elements of pictorial beauty: truth and charm of composition, expressiveness of movement, colour that in its loveliness runs down the whole scale, from the lightness and brightness of white and the most delicate changeful tints to the depth and glow of the sombre-splendid jewel. These are, no doubt, the chief elements of pictorial excellence. But, probe and analyse the work as we may, until we resolve it into its component parts-as light is divisible into the separate splendours of its component colours-we shall not necessarily have touched the very heart of its beauty, of its power to move.

The vital essence of the work it is that has this power, imperceptible, indefinable, yet without which it pines and dies-with which it is immortal. The power to surprise the innermost soul of beauty is in the personality of this man, who holds not only the brush of the mastercraftsman, but the transforming wand of the poet-painter; who sees and evokes visions bright with a fairy light that is too soon to vanish, leaving dull ache and solitude behind.

Touching with his wand the commonplace amenities of life, the light airy nothings of rustic and courtly gallantry, the conventional elegance of an arid and superficial epoch, he turns all this rainbow-tinted prettiness into 'something rich and strange' -into Elysian Fields of his own, shadowy and melancholy even in their atmosphere of serene beauty and joyousness. These airy, daintily arrayed figures of his, though they have not the soul or the speculation of ordinary mortals, though they merely

seem to move in a radiant atmosphere of beauty and pleasure, and strive all too languidly to achieve fruition of that for which they yearn, are yet not the mere marionnettes that Millet crushes with his scorn. They are the gentle shades of mortals, evoked to play, with rhythmic grace and melancholy sportiveness, their part in these conversations galantes, these love-makings without a to-morrow-nay, without a today—and then to die out by degrees, leaving the world dark and blank to the solitary man with the dull consuming fire at his heart. Well might we apostrophize his lovers as Keats does in immortal lines the figures of youth and maiden on his Gre

cian urn:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not
leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal. Yet do not
grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy
bliss ;

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Here, in this unpretentious work, by the vivacious and yet strangely pathetic painter of Fêtes Galantes, the elements of beauty and character are such as I have endeavoured to describe. The true beauty is Watteau at the heart of it all, Watteau glowing through and making it all his and no other's. If this crowning beauty, enveloping and colouring all the rest, were not indefinable, it would not be just what it is. There must ever be in great artwhatever the category to which it may nominally belong-this residuum, arriving at which we must needs end discussion and analysis, and leave the rest to perception by another sense given only to the few.4

4 It should be added that Colonel Browell's Wedding Festivities, having been acquired by the National Art-Collections Fund, has by that society been made over to the National Gallery of Ireland on payment by the latter of a certain proportion of the purchase price.

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