United States or Iran ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Though Coypel wanted a simplicity of taste, and mistook a presumptuous and assuming air for what is grand and majestic; yet he frequently has good sense and judgment in his manner of telling his stories, great skill in his compositions, and is not without a considerable power of expressing the passions, The modern affectation of grace in his works, as well as in those of Bouche and Watteau, may be said to be separated by a very thin partition from the more simple and pure grace of Correggio and Parmigiano.
With the earliest dawn he enters his workroom, the Watteau chamber, where he remains at work all day. The dark evenings he spends in industrious preparation with the crayon for the pictures he is to finish during the hours of daylight. His toil is also his amusement: he goes but rarely into the society whose manners he has to re-produce.
Suddenly, and without renouncing any ancient loyalty, he has come to life. It is Watteau that inspires him still; but the essential Watteau Watteau the painter not that superficies which is more or less familiar to every hack, be he limner or penman, who dabbles in the eighteenth century.
He gave her back the book; and as he was about to speak, she beckoned to him to follow her into a little morning- room appropriated to herself, no boudoir of white and gold, with pictures by Watteau, but lined with large walnut-tree presses, that held the old heirloom linen, strewed with lavender, stores for the housekeeper, and medicines for the poor.
Traversing a large salon with blue silk walls, framed in white and gold, the painter was shown into a sort of boudoir hung with tapestries of the last century, light and coquettish, those tapestries a la Watteau, with their dainty coloring and graceful figures, which seem to have been designed and executed by workmen dreaming of love. He had just seated himself when the Countess appeared.
And then inglorious Watteau, as he is! at times that steadiness, in which he is so great a contrast to Antony, as it were accumulates, changes, into a ray of genius, a grace, an inexplicable touch of truth, in which all his heaviness leaves him for a while, and he actually goes beyond the master; as himself protests to me, yet modestly.
I fancy Antony fled thither for a few moments, from the visitors who weary him; breathing the freshness of that dewy garden in the very midst of Paris. As for me, I suffocate this summer afternoon in this pretty Watteau chamber of ours, where Jean-Baptiste is at work so contentedly. May 1717.
The banquet in the air on the present occasion could only be done justice to by the courtly painters of the reign of Louis XV. Vanloo, and Watteau, and Lancres, would have caught the graceful group and the well-arranged colors, and the faces, some pretty, some a little affected; the ladies on fantastic chairs of wicker-work, gilt and curiously painted; the gentlemen reclining on the turf, or bending behind them with watchful care.
Evening had come, starlight, moonlight in the great garden at Sherwood Hall, and a blaze of light indoors, where little feet kept time to sweet music, and sweeter voices laughed and talked in merry mood. Princess Polly in white with silver spangles, a silver bandeau holding her powdered curls in place, looked like a little lady of the time of Watteau.
She was standing by a rosebush again, and was dressed in a cashmere morning-robe of the finest texture and the faintest pink: it had a Watteau plait down the back, jabot of lace down the front, and the close, high frills of lace around the throat which seemed to be a weakness with her.
Word Of The Day