Exhibition – The worlds of Watteau

As mysterious as he is celebrated, Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) is a rare artist. The Condé Museum has the second-largest collection of his works in France after the Louvre – four paintings and six drawings – and this nucleus serves as the starting point for a new exhibition at the Château de Chantilly. Also featuring several loans, it offers a never-before-seen glimpse into the artist’s most important and iconic works, revealing the intimate secrets and studio practices behind his masterpieces. Characterised by subtlety and often hidden emotions, his compositions are unrivalled in their poetic sensibility and explore love, friendship, music and dance alongside the universal themes of rejection, ridicule, unrequited love and solitude, helping explain why Watteau’s drawings and paintings remain as powerful and relevant today as ever. This artist was unmatched in his ability to capture the spirit of his time, with his often enigmatic and ambiguous works perfectly encapsulating the refined elegance of the private parties given under the Ancien Regime.

To present Watteau’s work in its best light, the Condé Museum has restored many of its masterpieces, which will be presented alongside loans of paintings and drawings to shed light on the artist at the height of his career. Leading experts on Watteau have also collaborated on the show, resulting in new discoveries and research. The exhibition explores the sources of Watteau’s inspiration, revealing how he crafted his compositions and the effects he aimed to create, to offer a unique glimpse into the origins of some of the most mysterious paintings ever produced.

Portraits

Watteau produced many portraits, although not all were intended as such. Some of his small heads, cropped from larger sheets, suggest he was often more interested in capturing a momentary pose than a model’s features, while other of his works focus on depth of gaze or facial harmony. This section demonstrates the artist’s ability to blend genres by taking a closer look at his small head studies and painted portraits from his courtship scenes.

Learning from the old masters

Watteau learned many valuable lessons from the old masters. Before studying under Claude Gillot and Claude III Audran, the artist worked as a copyist on the Pont Notre-Dame. During his time at Audran’s studio, he copied paintings at the Luxembourg Palace, formerly the Orléans Palace, including some by Rubens, who had a major impact on his work. Alongside his other influences, Watteau was also drawn to the Venetian school, particularly its figure drawings and compositions. This section explores the balance between Northern and Italian influences in Watteau’s work, showing how he adapted the styles of the old masters to create his unique compositions.

Perspectives on his world

A keen observer of contemporary life, Watteau created drawings more in tune with his time than often thought. His sketches of pilgrims on the Way of Saint James, Savoyards, Persians and young Black people raise new questions about his relationship with other cultures and people. The respectful, almost ethnographic quality of these drawings resonates particularly strongly with early Enlightenment ideas. Watteau’s work also includes depictions of commerce, offering a more pragmatic and less conceptual view of mercantile life. This is evident in his most famous painting, ‘The Sign of Gersaint,’ which depicts a luxury art shop.

Fashions and theatrical costumes

Fashion plays as central a role in Watteau’s work as commerce does, reflecting his close interest in the world around him. From his earliest drawings and paintings, Watteau experimented with a surprising combination of contemporary, historical and theatrical garments, drawing on their variety to create a rich visual library and reusing them in his paintings of fêtes galantes or ‘courtship parties’.

Fêtes galantes

The final section explores Watteau’s celebrated reinvention of the fête galante. Based on sources that have been the subject of extensive research, Watteau’s fêtes galantes reflect the new styles emerging from the end of Louis XIV’s reign to the Regency period. This section features works never seen in public before, expanding our understanding of Watteau’s fêtes galantes and challenging traditional views of them.