Art: Metropolitan’s Watteau

Sixty years ago a good picture by Jean Antoine Watteau cost less than $500. Last week Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum paid some $250,000 for its first Watteau painting. For $250,000 the Metropolitan in 1870, the year it was founded, could have bought every Watteau extant. Even in the last few years $250,000 would have bought two good Rembrandts, an El Greco, a couple of Gainsboroughs, several Rubens, at least one Goya, one Corot, and one Cézanne.

What the Metropolitan got last week for its money was Watteau’s excellent Le Mezzetin, whose full title is Le Mezzetin jouant de la Guitare. In 1932 Soviet Russia needed ready cash, dug Le Mezzetin out of Leningrad’s Hermitage Museum, sold it to Manhattan’s Wildenstein Galleries. Wildenstein lent it last summer to Chicago’s Century of Progress art show. It will be shown at the Metropolitan in January.

Jean Antoine Watteau was born to a Flemish coppersmith in 1684 in the town of Valenciennes. At 14 Jean Antoine began sulking to make his derisive father apprentice him to the best local painter. When he was 17, his master died and Watteau legged it for Paris. Starving, homeless, he had to sell his hat for food. In the shadow of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, he finally got a job painting the same picture of St. Nicolas over & over again for a wholesale picture shop. He rarely signed his work.

Watteau was a gloomy neurotic who never married, never stayed long in one place, snubbed his friends, had neither morals nor vices, distrusted himself and his painting and worked stupendously. In 1716 the Italian comedians whom Louis XIV’s prudish mistress, Maintenon, had banished 19 years before, were called back to France, and Watteau caught the vogue for them by painting Le Mezzetin.

Watteau’s greatest painting was the one he had to do to be received into the French Academy. Five years after he had promised it, the Academy lost patience and gave him a month. In seven days Watteau dashed off the Embarquement pour Cythère. Again, to limber up his fingers, he painted in eight days the famed signboard for the decorator’s shop of his friend Gersaint, which somebody later cut in two. Frederick the Great, however, picked up both halves.

In 1721 tuberculosis closed in quickly on Watteau. He was only 37, still moving from place to place, when he died near Vincennes.