Jean-Antoine Watteau
| Antoine Watteau | |
|---|---|
Watteau in the last year of his life, by Rosalba Carriera, 1721.
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| Born |
Jean-Antoine Watteau October 10, 1684 Valenciennes, France |
| Died | July 18, 1721 (aged 36) Nogent-sur-Marne, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Known for | Painting and architecture |
| Notable work |
Embarkation for Cythera, 1718/19 L'Enseigne de Gersaint, 1720/21 |
| Movement | Rococo |
Jean-Antoine Watteau (French: [ʒan‿ɑ̃twan vato]; baptised October 10, 1684 – died July 18, 1721), better known as Antoine Watteau, was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement, as seen in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens. He revitalized the waning Baroque style, shifting it to the less severe, more naturalistic, less formally classical Rococo.
Watteau is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes, scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, suffused with a theatrical air. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.
Watteau was born in October 1684 in the town of Valenciennes which had recently passed from the Spanish Netherlands to France. His father, Jean-Philippe Watteau, was a roofer given to brawling. Showing an early interest in painting, Jean-Antoine may have been apprenticed to Jacques-Albert Gérin, a local painter. Jean-Antoine's first artistic subjects were charlatans selling quack remedies on the streets of Valenciennes. Watteau left for Paris in 1702. There he found employment in a workshop at Pont Notre-Dame, making copies of popular genre paintings in the Flemish and Dutch tradition; it was in that period that he developed his characteristic sketchlike technique.
By 1705 he was employed as an assistant by the painter Claude Gillot, whose work represented a reaction against the turgid official art of Louis XIV's reign. In Gillot's studio Watteau became acquainted with the characters of the commedia dell'arte (its actors had been expelled from France in 1697), a favorite subject of Gillot's that would become one of Watteau's lifelong passions.
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