Watteau, (Jean) Antoine

Watteau, (Jean) Antoine (1684-1721), French painter, who is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of the Rococo period and as a forerunner of 19th-century Impressionism.

Watteau was born on October 10, 1684, in Valenciennes (now in France). At the age of 14 he began to study under an obscure painter of religious subjects in his native town. In 1702 he went to Paris, where he eked out a living as a painter for a dealer in cheap devotional pictures. He later studied under the French engraver and stage designer Claude Gillot, from whom he developed an interest in the character of the fashionable Italian commedia dell'arte.

About 1708 Watteau began to work with the decorative artist Claude Audran, curator of the Luxembourg Palace collections. There he had an opportunity to study a great series of Baroque paintings by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. In 1709 Watteau won second prize in the competition for the Prix de Rome and thereafter received many important commissions. He was named an associate of the French Academy in Paris in 1712 and was elected to full membership in 1717. Watteau, who had a frail constitution and was often ill, succumbed to tuberculosis. He died in Nogent-sur-Marne on July 18, 1721.

Watteau's canvases reflect the influence of the great Flemish painters, particularly Rubens, and of the Venetian school of painting. His own distinctive style, however, demonstrated a feeling for light and colour and offered a delicate sensuousness and lyric grace that had been previously unexplored. Other Rococo painters imitated Watteau's style, but they failed to achieve the dreamlike quality of his paintings. With the rise of Neo-Classicism in French art, Watteau's reputation declined , but, after the French Revolution, and especially in the Romantic period, it rose again.

Among Watteau's favourite subjects were fashionable outdoor gatherings, known as fêtes galantes (French, “scenes of gallantry”), in which elegant court ladies and gentlemen pass their time in pleasant dalliance among trees and shrubbery. His masterpiece in this category is L'Embarquement pour l'Île de Cythère (1717, Louvre, Paris). Another favourite subject was clowns, harlequins, and other figures from the commedia dell'arte, such as Harlequin and Columbine (1715, Wallace Collection, London) and The Italian Comedians (probably 1720), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.. L'Enseigne de Gersaint (1720, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), a signboard painted for the shop of an art dealer and friend of Watteau, is a masterpiece of realist genre in its composition and drawing. Watteau's use of colour influenced Impressionism.