A sense of equilibrium and calm settled over my weft and warp as I sat in the eaves of the National Gallery, bathed in a gentle north light, lulled by the hushed voices of conservators, and stimulated by wonderful conversations with major works by Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer and Giovanni da Rimini; oh, the sheer unadulterated pleasure of being back among friends, some of whom I had not seen for nearly two hundred years. My erstwhile friend the Velázquez was pretty jumpy when they removed part of his upper ground. Admittedly it was a later addition, but Diego worried they would take a leg or an ear off with it. Meanwhile, the poor old Rimini, painted in 1300 and left for over seven hundred years of total isolation in the private vestry of a minor Roman church, had been sold by cash-strapped monks and was now in a state of shock about how much the world has changed: he spent days murmuring, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” Diego and I soon got bored of saying “Amen” in reply. Imagine if they bring a rowdy Picasso or a depressed van Gogh up here—Rimini’s gold leaf will probably fall right off.
The head of the gallery, Septimus Ward-Thomas, came to look at me yesterday. He didn’t dwell (he is only really interested in Spanish baroque) but assented to let Agatha work on me in her spare time.
In idle moments I think of my mistress; one does get attached. Odd, really. Diego said it was Stockholm syndrome but as I have not been to Sweden for centuries, he is clearly off his woodwork. I wonder if Annie took up the young man’s suggestion about stopping at the British Museum’s drawings collection?
Agatha, to give her her due, is not rushing into anything. Yesterday she took the tiniest pinprick of paint from the side of my canvas and took it along the corridor to the scientific department. Four scientists studied the results and no cleaning will begin until they have worked out exactly what kind of paint my master used. Antoine was not into preparation. In fact, and it pains me to criticise, he was inclined to sloppiness. In pursuit of rapidity of execution, he liked to paint in a hurry. Canvases require careful preparation and preparation was not my master’s strong point. He was trying to get all those ideas, those feelings down. Instead of waiting for the paint to dry, he’d rub the canvas all over with huile gras and paint over that. The damage was increased by a certain want of cleanliness in his practice, which has affected the “constancy” of his colours and as a result, many faded. He seldom cleaned his palette and often went several days without setting it, so his paintings were filled with dust and dirt.
It’s time to tell you about him, Antoine and the love of his life. My master was born in Valenciennes in 1684 to an alcoholic, abusive roofer. The humble circumstance of his birth underscores his genius. His father wanted his son to follow his own profession and seek a regular wage; Antoine knew that he had to paint. In the middle of one night he ran away to Paris. It broke his mother’s heart and ruined his own health. The stupid boy chose winter to make the trek and after four days and four nights on foot, sleeping in ditches, eating only grass, he arrived in the capital with a debilitating pneumonia from which his lungs never fully recovered.
France was at its most sullen, choked by war, famine and the decrepitude of an aged, dyspeptic, embittered old monarch and the underhand bigoted rule of a power-crazed mistress, Madame de Maintenon. An ennui had settled over Parisian life, a heavy stinking fug of solipsistic oppression. Even the ceremonious court was exhausted by its own pomp. There was no gaiety or life in the arts, no spontaneity or originality. The pseudo-heroism of historical painting lay like a pretentious, weighty blanket on the merriest of souls. In the early 1700s, during the great plague of Marseilles, cannibalism and famine were the norm in the great capital. This was the backdrop to my master’s life.
Let us continue a few years to 1703. Antoine was still a young man, nineteen, working for the decorative painter Claude Gillot in Paris. The pay was a pittance, barely enough to cover a carafe of wine and a loaf of bread, but as long as he had a brush in hand, he was happy enough. To make ends meet my master sat in taverns and drew in return for alms. His was a life mired by undernourishment and poverty. Working for Gillot was useful training but the older man’s greatest contribution to my master’s education was excursions to performances by the banned theatrical group, the commedia dell’arte. These events took place in back-street taverns and the piquancy of performance was heightened by the prospect of a police raid. For most, the risk of arrest was worth taking: those wonderful actors were anarchic and lawless. Their leading man, Hippolyte, was broad, handsome and brave. Their clown, Gilles, was the fount of all jokes. Few in the troupe took anything seriously—they made fun of the ancient regime and its regulations. They laughed at love and life. Watching their performances, Antoine experienced a new lightness of spirit and a sense of optimism. In their exuberant, ebullient midst, he shook off, albeit briefly, his heavy heritage of Valenciennes, the years of war and poverty.
He took to going every night. On the fourth visit, my master saw her, Charlotte Desmares, widely acknowledged as the most beautiful girl in Paris, who joined the Italians for occasional performances. Her stage name was Colette. Putting down his brush and grabbing some chalks from his pockets, Antoine began frantically sketching this maiden as she pliéed, twirled and danced around the stage. Charlotte saw him, but she was one of those women who was so used to being watched that the sight of another young man rapt in admiration was hardly out of the ordinary.
Watteau drew till his fingers bled. Feigning an upset stomach, my master rushed back to his tiny atelier, where, taking the one canvas he owned, he started to paint. That piece of cloth, stretched between four pieces of wood, that inauspicious piece of nothingness, became moi.
I am the receptacle, the vessel into which all the agony and ecstasy of first love was poured. Urgency and magic, excitement, passion and terror flew from his heart to his brush. Watteau’s ardour was so strong that there was no time to prepare the paint properly on the palette. Instead he flicked and mixed colours one next to the other in a frenzy of dabs and wipes—look at the trees, admire the sunlight, the pointillism, blurred edges, the informality and you will see the birth of Impressionism, though it took the rest of the world some one hundred and fifty years to catch up.
I am the representation of his impassioned, deranged, inflamed desire. I am l’amour fou. La gloire d’amour. I am the literal exemplification of utter mortal madness.
Hidden under the layers of varnish and overpaint, you will see that Charlotte’s cap isn’t uniform red—it’s gold and yellow and crimson and magenta, silvering down to palest pink. Her dress is saffron—yellow grading from palest canary to golden buttercup, each delicate colour laid, splashed in minute harmony. Yellow, too, peeps through the opening in her décolletage and her skirt is hot with pale purple and soft browns. Her skin is creamy white like an opal taking reflections from light. There will never be a more beautiful painting of flesh, even among the Venetians.
There have been other painters and muses. One thinks of Rembrandt and Hendrickje, Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne, Dalí and Gala, Bacon and George Dyer, but I propose that it was my master’s demented love for Charlotte that imbues my canvas with added unmatched fervour.
The composition was one my master returned to his whole life: the stage of love. The background is transitory and artificial, a mythical, mystical landscape adorned by figures reclining, overlooked by a statue of the goddess of love. In the middle he placed Charlotte, as proud and as graceful as a swan. Raising her delicate arms, she looks directly, fiercely, provocatively at the viewer. At her feet, the simply dressed young man just stares. With only the lightest flick of a fine brush, Antoine captures his awe as he looks up at this vision of femininity. You can taste the hope and despair, the love and lust implicit in his gaze.
If I tell you that the man’s face is composed of only seven strokes of a brush you’ll laugh and remonstrate that this can’t be so; but that is why my master is a genius and why his star is still in the firmament of great artists nearly three hundred years after his death. He understands the alchemy of red and pink and pearly white. More importantly, he understands mankind, and he can, like great artists, translate our innermost joy and fear into something tangible.
Some say I’m only a sketch. It’s true that I was executed with haste and élan. This intensity released Antoine from the past, from the teachings of dreary academics, from childish doodling, and in his hurry to capture love he had found his métier and a new way of painting. I was the canvas that launched a career. I was the painting that started a movement, the rococo.
I was painted to celebrate the wild cascades of love, the rollicking, bucking, breaking and transformative passion that inevitably gave way to miserable, constricting, overbearing disappointment.
Four days later, when the paint was hardly dry, Antoine took me back to the theatre as a present for Charlotte. Imagine this young, gawky nineteen-year-old laying open his heart. The troupe crowded around, pushing and shuffling, giggling and chattering like tiny chaffinches at a bird table. I had my first brush with death. Charlotte’s rival, Hortense, was so overcome with jealousy that she ran her long nails down my canvas. A fraction harder and she’d have damaged me for ever. Shocking really. Charlotte was rather delighted. The attentions of this young painter elevated her and her cachet was upped by his gift of love.
“Give it to me,” she demanded, holding out her pretty little hand. Watteau started to hand the picture over—then he hesitated. “No,” he said. “It will be my present to you the day you agree to marry me. Until then, it will never leave my side.” The company fell about in mirth. How could a young penniless painter compete with her lover, the Duc d’Orléans, nephew of Louis XIV? Their laughter was so intense, so heartfelt, that it brought Gillot running to see what the commotion was about. He looked from the actress to the painter and his eyes finally rested on me. The blood drained from his face; it took only a glance to realise that the younger man was by far the superior painter. Gillot, to give him his due, could not have been more gracious. “I can’t teach you anything more but I can point you in the right direction.” He sent my master to work with Claude Audran, an interior decorator in charge of the Palais de Luxembourg, home to wondrous works by Rubens, Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto.
The other actors begged Antoine to paint them and many would return with him to his atelier and sit for hour after hour while he immortalised them in chalk and pen and occasionally even in oil. But if you look at his great works you will always find glimpses of her—sometimes it’s her face, other times it’s her neck, arm, back, her foot. The essence of love for Charlotte haunts most of his paintings. Her sweet girlish visage peeps out everywhere and the spirit of his love for her, his unbridled romance, steals into all of his works.
If I were to offer a soupçon of criticism against my master it would be in the field of courtship: love is as much an art as painting or living; it requires practice, finesse, determination, humility, energy and delicacy. Like many before and since, my master became enamoured with the sweet ecstasy of unrequited passion; he saw his “problem” as not being loved, when really it was the inability to give love. He was so green behind the ears, so naïve, that he thought love arrived fully formed and complete. It never occurred to him, after that first rejection, to earn Charlotte’s respect or her heart. He flounced off to his studio. I’m sorry to say that some find the agony of rejection far sweeter than the ecstasy of consummation.
To try and expunge the hussy’s memory, he painted over Charlotte’s face with that of another woman’s. Then he added the clown, a ghostly figure in the gloaming: a Pierrot, the embodiment of pathos and derision. It was a self-portrait he returned to over and over again for the rest of his short life.
Then he changed my title. Once I was called The Glory of Love; after her rejection, I became The Improbability of Love.
So what happened next? I’ll tell you the rest in good time.