Take a look at the painting above. Would you call this artist a “lugubrious fantasist” who makes works of “surpassing strangeness?”
At first glance, the works in La Surprise: Watteau in Los Angeles resemble many other 18th-century works of art.
But look more closely with the help of Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings, and you’ll discover the surprisingly surreal details in the works of one of France’s most influential painters.
A New Genre of Art
To help understand the works of Jean-Antoine Watteau, take a short trip back to 18th-century France. The year was 1712, and the Royal Academy—France’s premier art institution and the last word on high art at the time—only acknowledged four genres of paintings: “History, landscape, still life, and portraiture,” said Gasparotto.
Along came 28-year-old painter Jean-Antoine Watteau, who wanted to join the Academy. The Royal Academy requested that he paint a work of art that proved him worthy of admission. He made them wait five years before he finally submitted his piece.
That painting was Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera. It wasn’t a historical scene, landscape, still life, or portrait. It was a painting of a boat party on a golden barge piloted by half-naked men, spilling over with party goers in chic outfits, heralded by flying cupids on their way to what looks like an 18th-century blow-out on one of Greece’s best party islands.
It was a mic drop: a painting so good that the Royal Academy had to accept it. The subject was so different from the very-serious subject matter that came before it that the Royal Academy created a new genre of painting for it: the fête galante.
What Is a Fête Galante?
A new category of painting, certainly. When Watteau submitted the work, he was “probably intolerant to the traditional genres of painting and wanted to create something new,” said Gasparotto.
Literally translated, fête galante means “courtship party.” These paintings, said Gasparotto, can be identified as “generally small, with figures within a landscape, partying, chatting, flirting, making music, sometimes dressed in the fancy costumes of the Italian commedia dell’arte.” They are paintings of parties, gallantry, music, dance, and actors; an 18th-century iteration of an iconic Hollywood party you might find photographed in Harper’s Bazaar.
More Than Just a Party
Recently acquired by Getty, La Surprise is Gasparotto’s favorite painting in the exhibition “because it shows Watteau at his best and it’s in the best possible conservation condition.”
At first glance, it looks like a simple scene, perhaps an offshoot of a garden party. There’s a couple, a guitar player, and a dog. But the closer you look at this painting’s subjects, the stranger they become.
For instance, the couple. Are they dancing? It cannot be to the music in frame. The Mezzetin is still tuning his guitar. Their poses are also quite strange. Look at the woman’s body. Is this a dip? Or is she inebriated or perhaps trying to get away?
A “Cut and Paste Artist”
Watteau’s sketch book holds some clues to how the figures are oriented. Most of his paintings draw from a collection of rough penciled studies of drawings he made from models, other paintings, and various sources of inspiration he found around him.
Take a look at the two drawings above, sketched in 1716 and 1714, respectively. Recognize anyone? They’re the figures in La Surprise, “cut” from his sketchbooks and “pasted” into the paintings almost exactly as they appear in his sketchbook.
The couple and the Mezzetin in La Surprise don’t seem to have any connection to one another because they don’t. This “cut and paste” technique results in what scholars writing in Watteau at Work: La Surprise—the exhibition’s accompanying text, which Gasparotto recommends to anyone who wants to learn more about the artist’s unique method—call the “surpassing strangeness” of a “lugubrious fantasist.”
And, said Gasparotto, it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of Watteau’s paintings. Because they have “no fixed meaning, you can wander around it making your own story of it and what is happening inside.” As is often the case with Watteau’s works, the subject of La Surprise is vague and ambiguous, allusive and seductive, and as such it is the epitome of the fête galante, a genre that he had invented.”
To look more closely at more of Watteau’s paintings, visit La Surprise: Watteau in Los Angeles, and create your own backstory for these fascinating garden parties.
