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It's Miss Farrell's room. She always likes the quiet side. And I've put Miss Cookson next door. I thought you'd wish to be together? Nelly entered a room furnished in white and pale green, luxurious in every detail, and hung with engravings after Watteau framed in white wood. Through an open door shewed another room a little smaller, but equally dainty and fresh in all its appointments.
Watteau and Boucher and Fragonard painted for the frivolous nobility of the eighteenth century just what that nobility wanted, and even the precursors of the Revolution, sober and honest Chardin, Greuze the sentimental, had no difficulty in making themselves understood, until the revolutionist David became dictator to the art of Europe and swept them into the rubbish heap with the rest.
More marvellous work the world never saw, and will never see again: a maze of assimilated influences, strangely assimilated, and eluding definition remembrances of Watteau and the Dutch painters, a good deal of Ingres' spirit, and, in the vigour of the arabesque, we may perhaps trace the influence of Poussin.
For in truth Antony Watteau is still the mason's boy, and deals with that world under a fascination, of the nature of which he is half-conscious methinks, puzzled at "the queer trick he possesses," to use his own phrase. You see him growing ever more and more meagre, as he goes through the world and its applause.
The stately jig executed by the little couple was very pretty, for the childish faces were so earnest, the costumes so gay, and the steps so peculiar, that they looked like the dainty quaint figures painted on a Watteau fan. The Princess's train was very much in her way, and the sword of Prince Rob nearly tripped him up several times.
"An omnibus, if you please, Douglas!" she exclaimed. "Joan would never forgive me the extravagance if she saw me in a cab. I can find one at the corner, and I should feel so much more comfortable if you would leave me here." He looked down at her and realised once more the dainty Watteau like grace of her oval face and slim, supple figure.
He approaches that life, and all its pretty nothingness, from a level no higher than its own; and beginning just where Antony Watteau leaves off in disdain, produces a solid and veritable likeness of it and of its ways. March 1715. February 1716.
The vague web of courtship, dalliance, intrigue and jealousy called up by these characters attracted Watteau to employ them in his compositions, and to make them also the medium of the more sincere sentiments of conjugal love and friendship, as in The Music Lesson, Gilles and his Family and Harlequin and Columbine, at Hertford House.
That one on Denys L'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled god has he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched white Flesh? leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, where his passion for things faded and withdrawn reaches its climax.
In the windows of these places you will see: innumerable French mirrors; stacks of empty picture frames of French eighteenth-century design, at an amazingly cheap figure each; remarkably inexpensive reproductions in bright colours of Sir Joshua, Corot, Watteau, Chardin, Fragonard, some Italian Madonnas; an assortment of hunting prints, and prints redolent of Old English sentiment; many wall "texts," or "creeds"; a variety of the kind of coloured pictures technically called, I believe, "comics"; numerous little plaster casts of anonymous works and busts of standard authors; frequently an ambitious original etching by an artist unknown to you; and an occasional print of the "September Morn" kind of thing; together with many "art objects" and a great deal of "bric-a-brac."
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