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Four o'clock will soon strike, and the watchman in the green coat, who is snoozing before Watteau's designs, will arouse from his torpor, stretch his arms, look at his watch, get up from his seat, and call out "Time to close." Why do you allow Maurice to help you arrange your things, to accompany you through the galleries, carrying your box of pastels?
She saw, distinctly saw, not exactly a savage, perhaps, but a man in rags, whose tattered blouse seemed covered with blood, whose face, hands, and whole person were repulsively filthy, whose beard was frightful, and whose eyes half protruded from their sockets; in short, an individual, by the side of whom the most atrocious of Salvator Rosa's brigands would be as one of Watteau's shepherds.
We cross to the L. wall, where the rich collection of works by Watteau and his followers is placed: 983, Gilles, a scene from a Comedy, is one of Watteau's most precious pictures.
There was too much joy of the south in Monticelli's bones to concern himself with the cruel imaginings of the Orient or the grisly visions of the north. He was Oriental au fond; but it was the Orientalism of the Thousand and One Nights. He painted scenes from the Decameron, and his fêtes galantes may be matched with Watteau's in tone.
When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar, might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.
All of these three were engraved in Watteau's life-time or shortly after his death, and the verses sub-joined to the engravings are a charming rendering of the sentiment underlying the pictures. In The Music Lesson we see the half length figures of a lady, seated, reading a music book, and of a man playing a lute opposite to her.
After that hard apprenticeship, Watteau's condition became slightly better. He had been employed near the Pont Notre Dame, at three francs a week, but now in the studio of a scene painter, Gillot, he did work of coarse effect, very different from that exquisite school of art which he was to bring into being.
But the melancholy poet that was in the man, his lyric pessimism, and his unassuaged thirst for the infinite these things they did not see. Caylus, who has left the only data of value, speaks of Watteau's hatred of life, his aversion at times from the human face, his restlessness that caused him to seek new abodes Chopin was always dissatisfied with his lodgings and always changing them.
The moment his pencil touched the theme of life lived upon as gentle a plane as possible, then something was kindled at its point which betrayed the presence of genuine inspiration. The inspiration was of the same nature as Watteau's, the grace of a certain aspect of life making an æsthetic appeal.
Only, methinks 'tis a pity to incorporate so much of his work, of himself, with objects of use, which must perish by use, or disappear, like our own old furniture, with mere change of fashion. July 1714. On the last day of Antony Watteau's visit we made a party to Cambrai.
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