New York
Antoine Watteau is universally admired as the painter of fêtes galantes, those rarefied scenes of the beau monde in the waning years of Louis XIV. But there is a corner of Watteau’s career, his depictions of military life, that has received less attention and is now the focus of this fine show. Because Watteau’s work in this field is limited to 10 paintings, a few engravings, and several dozen drawing sheets, the Frick exhibition, with 4 of the paintings and many of the drawings, is nearly definitive.
It is one of the oddities of our generation, compared with our forebears, that we are apt to know more about art history than about history, and thus to view the latter as a frame or context for the former. Seeing Watteau’s courtiers and damsels embarking for Cythera, or flitting about the gardens of the ancien régime, we tend to forget that these images were conceived within a context of unceasing war. Most of Watteau’s short life, from 1684 to 1721, passed under the shadow of Louis XIV’s endless military campaigns. Watteau was born six years after the Treaty of Nijmegen ratified the astounding conquests of Louis’s youth, and the painter was 13 when, after the disastrous battles of Louis’s middle age, the Treaty of Ryswick revoked most of those conquests.
But the ink was scarcely dry on that document when Louis embarked on the War of the Spanish Succession. Among its more notable contests was the 1709 Battle of Malplaquet—perhaps the bloodiest day of the 18th century—fought only a few miles from Valenciennes, the northern town in which Watteau was born. As a Walloon, Watteau’s artistic allegiances owed as much to Flanders as to France. Although it takes a practiced eye to see, the pearl-like flesh-tones and feathery foliage of his diminutive paintings originate in the maximalist works of his great Flemish forebear, Peter Paul Rubens. But if most of Rubens’s followers—and there were many of them—were history painters, Watteau was nearly unique in applying the lessons of the master to genre scenes.
Even in these military works, Watteau does not depict battles but rather the slow, wearisome camp life that preceded and followed them. Occasionally a pair of female figures, as in The Halt, reminds us of the Watteau we know and love, the charming painter of fêtes galantes. But for the most part, these images are murkier than those we usually associate with the artist. Their often-twilit indeterminacy is a far cry from the sparkling light of his court scenes, while gray and brown earth-tones have supplanted the shimmer of velvet and silk. In general, Watteau puts on a brave face—almost like a conscript who, once in uniform, is determined to make the best of things, even if the circumstances of military life hardly conform to the bend of his nature. The perspective in these works is often a little skewed, some of the figures seem disengaged from their spatial context, and matters are not helped by a frequently poor state of preservation.
What is most novel and striking about these works, however, is their depiction of individual soldiers going about their business. And in this respect, the paintings are greatly supported by an abundance of drawings at the Frick. When we compare the paintings with the drawings on which they were based, we find almost a split in artistic consciousness. Although reality tends to be fastidiously mediated in Old Master paintings, the preliminary drawings that underpin them often reveal an astounding clarity of observation.
That is surely the case with Watteau. But whereas earlier artists had brought that intensity of observation to a mother and child or a hunting dog, Watteau applies it, almost for the first time, to men at war. He observes and records how they stand together or apart, how they clean a musket or don a cloak or beat a drum, how they slouch in boredom amid the interminable pauses of military life. It is strange to think that so many of these poses, although part of the universal vocabulary of human gestures, were new to art when Watteau depicted them.
The result of all this observation as Aaron Wile, the exhibit’s curator, writes in his learned catalogue—is that, although earlier painters like David Teniers the Younger and Philips Wouwerman depicted scenes of war, “Watteau’s work is set apart from these earlier examples by its focus on the experience of the soldier.” That is certainly and importantly true; but I am less certain of Wile’s subsequent claim that Watteau’s soldiers seem to be “endowed with an inner life, with subjectivity.” These are genre scenes and, as such and by definition, they favor the general over the particular. It is with a remarkably dry and dispassionate eye that Watteau captures the poses of these soldiers. He observes them closely, but entirely from the outside, and it is their external existence alone that interests him.
I find little evidence of an “inner life” beyond our a priori knowledge that all men have one. It should also be said that Watteau reveals little manifest sympathy for those men he observes: He is almost like a journalist, reporting the facts. And yet, for all that, he cannot entirely suppress in himself that instinct to infuse even these unlovely scenes with much of the charm and perfume of the ancien régime.
James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.
