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1684-1721 Arriving in Paris without money, connections, or much artistic training, Antoine Watteau achieved fame and celebrity as one of the greatest French painters of his time and is considered to be one of the key influences in Rococo art. Rubens was a prime influence for the type of picture most associated with Watteau - the fete galante, in which exquisitely dressed young people idle away their time in a dreamy, romantic and pastoral setting. Watteau was also the first painter to make the them of the "garden of love" his own. He was an independent artist who did not submit readily to the will of patrons. His method of juxtaposing flecks of color on canvas was carried further by Delacroix and Seurat, as well as other Neo-Impressionists.Watteau.s work was widely collected during his lifetime and influenced a number of other painters in the decades following his death, especially in France and England. His drawings were particularly admired. Documented facts about Watteau.s life are notoriously few, though several friends wrote about him after his death (see Champion). Of over two hundred paintings generally accepted as his work.of which many of the compositions survive only in the form of reproductive prints by others.only the Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (1717; Paris, Louvre), his morceau de réption for admission to the Acadée Royale, and a handful of others can be dated with reasonable certainty. Moreover, most of the titles by which his works are known were not recorded until after his death, when prints of them were published. |
