Watteau and his World: French Drawing from 1700 to 1750 (review)

Students of graphic art from any historical period welcome an exhibition of drawings by Antoine Watteau. For specialists in eighteenth-century art and culture, the show that opened at the Frick Collection in Fall 1999 and travels to the National Gallery of Canada in spring 2000 deserves particular attention for its succinct demonstration of Watteau’s accomplishment and its inclusion of works by several other artists whose graphic art influenced, paralleled or emulated that of Watteau. The curator, Alan P. Wintermute, Senior Specialist of Old Master paintings at Christie’s, selected the drawings with obvious care, so that in a relatively small exhibition (approximately sixty-five drawings at the Frick Collection), one encountered multiple aspects of Watteau’s art as well as some of the richness and diversity of graphic production in the first half of the eighteenth century in France. The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition features Wintermute’s perceptive entries on the individual works, as well as an essay that traces the general development and influence of Watteau’s graphic art. Specialists’ essays augment the catalogue’s scholarly value: Pierre Rosenberg briefly considers Watteau’s drawings after other artists (an unexpectedly revealing aspect of the exhibition itself); Margaret Morgan Grasselli addresses problems of connoisseurship in works by Watteau’s followers; and Colin B. Bailey presents a suggestive account of the reception of Watteau’s drawings in light of changing trends in the collecting of graphic art during the era of Louis XV. Because some of the drawings were destined to appear at only one of the two exhibition venues, the catalogue also provides the fullest view of the show as a whole.

At the Frick Collection most of the drawings were installed in two rooms, one featuring the works of Watteau and the other works by all the other artists, a varied group including (among others) François Boucher, Charles de La Fosse, Nicolas Lancret, François Lemoyne, Jean-Baptise Oudry and Jacques-André Portail. At the outset of the show, in a small room featuring early drawings by Watteau as well as a few by his one-time master Claude Gillot, a visitor happily encountered one of the early paintings of soldiers by Watteau, The Portal of Valenciennes, recently acquired by the Frick Collection. Already displaying the intriguing postures and visual links among figures that would come to characterize Watteau’s later paintings and drawings, this work also features a resonant use of color glazing on the great, ragged wall that rises behind the soldiers—a sensitivity to the textural properties of color that would reach an apogée in Watteau’s later trois crayons studies, several of which were on display in the adjoining room devoted to Watteau’s drawings alone. The selection of drawings in this room showed a full range of the artist’s work: studies of figures in fashionable, theatrical, and exotic costume dating from different periods of his short career; several studies of the female nude; a decorative design; landscape and figural studies after other artists; and even a relatively rare and sympathetic study of hunting hounds with fur subtly mottled in red and black chalk.

In his selection of works and in the catalogue text Wintermute emphasized Watteau’s working practice as illuminated by the drawings: we moved from earlier studies executed just in the red chalk used commonly by French artists of this era, to works which showed Watteau’s exploration first of black chalk and then of white as well to enhance the naturalistic vibrancy and decorative richness of his figural subjects. We could witness this process of coloristic discovery in two studies of figures in Persian costume: in one, a judicious use of...