Antoine Watteau valuation
Invented the fête galante, lovers, actors and music in an imagined parkland, and set the tone of the Rococo.
Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was born in Valenciennes, a town that had become French only a few years before, and went to Paris in 1702.
What a work by Antoine Watteau is worth
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Bio
Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was born in Valenciennes, a town that had become French only a few years before, and went to Paris in 1702. He worked for the theatre painter Claude Gillot, from whom he took the characters of the commedia dell'arte, and for the decorator Claude Audran, keeper of the Luxembourg Palace, where he studied Rubens's paintings for Marie de' Medici. He was received into the Académie in 1717 with The Pilgrimage to Cythera, now in the Louvre, and the Académie created a new category for it, the fête galante: elegant couples, music and play-acting in an imaginary parkland. He visited London in 1719 and 1720, and in 1720 painted a shop sign for his friend the dealer Gersaint, now in Berlin. The Wallace Collection in London has one of the finest groups of his paintings.
Paintings by Watteau are rare, and most are in museums. What comes to market is mostly drawings, above all his studies of figures, heads and hands in red, black and white chalk, the technique known as trois crayons, which collectors have prized since his lifetime. His success was immediate and his manner easy to follow, so the field is crowded: Jean-Baptiste Pater and Nicolas Lancret painted fêtes galantes in his style, Jean de Jullienne had almost all his work engraved in the 1720s and 1730s, and copies after those engravings were made for two centuries. The difference between Watteau, his circle, a follower and a later copy is the whole question, settled by the handling and by a provenance traced through the great French collections.
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