I’ve just read Anita Brookner’s wonderful monograph on Watteau, her first book (1967), published before she published her first novel. It’s written with a novelist’s insight into character and is beautifully expressed, perfectly scholarly (French 18th century painting was her specialism), but it draws you in to the subject.
Of Les Fêtes Vénitiennes (detail above) she writes:
As the Grand Turk can be identified as Vleughels, a perceptive scholar has suggested that the bagpipe player may in fact be Watteau himself. Underneath his obviously borrowed (or hired) costume, he appears to be rougher and lumpier in texture than his fellows, and is wearing an expression of haggard benignity which betokens both physical exhaustion and social strain. The implication are obvious and acceptable. The man wearing a cloak and tricorn hat in the background is caught in a deeply theatrical attitude; though nobody is looking at him, he is about to make a resounding exit. Odd items of Comedia del’Arte costume can be detected here and there in the audience – a hat, a ruff, a green satin doublet – but the setting has been turned into something totally straightforward: a clearing in one of the allées of any of the great woods around Paris.
MARSHALL COLMAN 