Antoine Watteau
1684-1721
Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French Rococo painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement. In the tradition of Correggio and Rubens, it revitalized the waning Baroque idiom, which eventually became known as Rococo. He is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes: scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, suffused with an air of theatricality. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.
Antoine Watteau was born on October 10, 1684, in Valenciennes, a Flemish town that had become French shortly before his birth. In 1702 he went to Paris, where he eked out a living as a painter for a dealer in cheap devotional pictures. He later studied under the French engraver and stage designer Claude Gillot, from whom he gained an interest in the character of the fashionable Italian commedia dell'arte.
About 1708 Watteau began to work with the decorative artist Claude Audran, curator of the Luxembourg Palace collections. In 1709 Watteau placed second in the competition for the Prix de Rome and thereafter received many important commissions. Named an associate of the French Academy in Paris in 1712, he was elected to full membership in 1717. Watteau, who had a frail constitution and was often ill, succumbed to tuberculosis. He died in Nogent-sur-Marne on July 18, 1721.
Watteau's canvases reflect the influence of the great Flemish painters, particularly Rubens, and of the Venetian school of painting. Antoine Watteau is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of the rococo period and as a forerunner of 19th-century impressionism.
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