20619657

Middleman: Antoine Watteau and "Les Charmes de la Vie"
Author(s): Judy Sund

Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Mar., 2009), pp. 59-82
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20619657
Accessed: 12-09-2018 00:20 UTC
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Middleman: Antoine Watteau and Les Charmes de la Vie
Judy Sund
Les charmes de la vie, the portrayal of an intimate music party his attempts to address his subjects and patrons in their
set on a majestic terrace, painted about 1717 (Fig. 1), is the preferred mode.6
sort of picture for which Antoine Watteau is best known: a fete Remarkably nonnarrative for their time, Watteau's fetes
galante, or depiction of an open-air social gathering of fash galantes are neither illustrational in the manner of traditional
ionable Parisians. While Les charmes?like many fetes galan history painting nor anecdotal and moralizing in the mode of
tes?may appear to take up an "elegant, inconsequential sub seventeenth-century genre scenes. Nonetheless, they are al
ject,"1 its genteel tenor is strikingly disrupted by certain lied to both, communicating, as history and genre paintings
departures from elegance. The painting's central figure is do, by way of their figures' attitudes, gestures, and clothing
awkward and straining in his attempt to tune his instrument, and evocative props and settings, as well as by references to
and the nearby springer spaniel is caught in an uncouth literary types and characters, nods to traditional emblems
quest for fleas. Similar discordant notes pepper other of and allegories, and allusions to contemporary social practice.
Watteau's fetes galantes, prompting the suspicion that such Modern scholars of Watteau routinely have noted the em
indelicacies might be calculated and consequential. blematic dimensions of the fetes galantes, which often involve
Even as Les charmes conforms to its genre by treating social the vexed pursuit of romantic love and its carnal accompa
aspiration of a possibly romantic nature, it may also be read niments. Previous interpretations of Les charmes de la vie, for
as a commentary on the ways that nature (in its human, instance, characterize it as a picture in which courtship rituals
animal, and vegetal forms) was sophisticated and aestheti are symbolically elucidated by the actions of concertizing
cized by and for wealthy Parisians. Ultimately, Les charmes de la (and, more precisely, their failure to proceed as planned).7
vie constitutes an outsider's reflection on the relative success Music making as a metaphor for both the satisfactions and
of such ventures. missteps of courtship is a prominent thematic subset of the
The product of long deliberation, Les charmes de la vie was fetes galantes, one that derived from the rich iconography of
also reworked on Watteau's easel.2 Its central figure began his Dutch and Flemish paintings in this vein, which were familiar
pictorial life months (even years) earlier, as a lutenist in to and admired by Watteau and his Parisian contemporaries
Watteau's Pour nous prouvons que cette belle (Fig. 2), and sub (Fig. 4).8
sequently appeared in full length as the centralized theorbo Taking a cue from the sorts of pictures the Dutch call
tuner in Le prelude au concert (Fig. 3).3 Les charmes de la vie not buitenpartijen ("outdoor parties"),9 Watteau consistently situ
only incorporates figures from Le prelude au concert but also ated romantic pursuits on the edges of civilized life (in gar
recapitulates that picture's general layout. Although equiva dens and parks and on terraces), places where nature and
lent in size and similar in subject to Le prelude, Les charmes is culture intermingle. Such venues complement Watteau's
stronger (more tightly painted, more rigorously composed) equally consistent presentation of courtship itself as such a
and more complex (embellished by architectural enhance juncture: a practice in which nature (passion and instinct)
ments, an additional dog, a servant, and a wine tub). The and culture (politesse and ritual) are counterpoised. Clearly
later picture's formal lucidity and enrichment would seem to intrigued by the murky center of the nature/culture contin
betoken greater conceptual clarity on the artist's part, uum (where society's elites not only dallied but also staged
and/or an attempt to push a familiar theme in a different displays of power10), Watteau made intersections of the man
direction.4 made and organic, the cultivated and wild, finesse and awk
These speculations, and those that follow, are proffered in wardness his particular province. Nowhere is this more ap
full awareness of the opacity of Watteau's artistic aims. Even parent than in Les charmes de la vie, the embellishments of
in his own time, his pictures apparently did not convey mean which arguably were devised with such junctures in mind.
ing in obvious ways.5 Watteau's penchant for the enigmatic The relation of nature and art?complementary, despite
and equivocal?particularly in the 1710s, when the fetes ga their oppositions?was a topic of long-standing interest in
lantes were made?might be linked to the glorification of Watteau's Paris. The concept of la belle nature?an idealized
obfuscation among Parisian elites, in whose company the amalgam incorporating only the most pleasing aspects of
painter increasingly found himself. Dedicated to stylized "brute" nature?informed academic art as well as inflecting a
and selective self-representation, habitues of the haut monde variety of social practices, as aesthetes rejected nature in the
to which the fetes galantes allude favored masks, disguises, raw as uncouth and vulgar. French aristocrats, bent on trans
contrived personas, and complexly coded behaviors that forming their natural selves into works of art, at the same
thwarted peers' apprehension of below-the-surface emotions time recognized the importance of tempering artifice with
and motives. The evasiveness of Watteau's mature work (re "natural" touches (prompting Jean de La Bruyere's mordant
plete with turned-away figures and inconclusive gestures and observation, "So much art just to return to nature!"11). Sub
expressions) probably reflects behaviors he observed and urban gardeners rerouted streams, planted allees, and coaxed
may imply his own assimilation of a societal ideal, as well as and cut plants into conformity;12 pet fanciers (themselves a
50 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2009 VOLUME XCI NUMBER 1
1 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Les charmes de la vie, ca. 1717, oil on canvas, 26!/2 X 36% in. (67.3 X 92.5 cm). The Wallace Collection,
London (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by The Trustees of the Wallace Collection)
fairly new breed) trained parrots to talk and dogs to move or

be still on command;13 and those who possessed (or imag
ined the possession of14) petits negres dressed them in finery
(Figs. 5, 6) and gave them classical names.15 The freethinking
libertine, meantime, decried society's denatured mores and
railed against priests' and legislators' attempts to thwart "nat
ural" desires and behaviors by promoting artificial notions of
virtue.16
Watteau's interest in this discourse is perhaps first evident
in his forays into singerie, a widespread European genre that
exploited monkeys' quasi-human aspects to humorous and
satirical ends.17 These forays may have been instigated by
ornamentalist Claude III Audran; Watteau and Audran ap
parently collaborated in 1709 and 1710 on a set of panels for
Louis XIV's chateau at Marly, drawings for which show mon
key feasters attended by a lively simian staff (Fig. 7).18 Some
years later?here following the lead of David Teniers (Fig.
2 Watteau, Powr wows prouvons que cette belle (The Music Lesson), 8)19?Watteau emblematized the practices of painting and
ca. 1716, oil on panel, 6% X 7Vh in. (16.1 X 19.9 cm). The
sculpture in paired pictures of monkey artists that reference
Wallace Collection, London (artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by The Trustees of the Wallace the classical maxim "ars simiae naturae" ("art is the ape of
Collection) nature," or, more colloquially, "art apes nature"). Known for
mimicry, monkeys often were used to symbolize unthinking,
slavish imitation?hence, insipid art?as in Teniers's portray
ANTOINE WATTEAU AND LES CHARMES DE LA VIE ?\
3 Watteau, Le prelude au concert,

ca. 1717, oil on canvas, 26 X 35% in.
(66 X 91 cm). Schloss Charlottenburg,
Stiftung Preussische Schl?sser und
G?rten Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin
(artwork in the public domain; photo
graph by Erich Lessing, provided by
Art Resource, NY)
by the ^^^^^HI^^^^^^^^^^^^^B^^^^^^kI^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^H
als of glib simian artists and the connoisseurs who admire costume and the framed picture within La peinture, which
their work. Unlike Teniers's self-satisfied monkey, however, represents a stage production featuring characters from the
the protagonist of Watteau's La peinture (Fig. 9) seems Comedie Italienne (the sort of picture Watteau produced in
drained, not delighted, by his endeavors20?perhaps because Claude Gillot's studio21). This displayed work, which might
his fabled proclivity for copying nature has been thwarted by be described as an artifice inspired by artifice, implies, in
enslavement to culture. combination with the painter's mannequin model and dispir
Alone in his shadowy studio, hemmed in by cultural trap ited demeanor, that even an artist so inclined would be
pings (easel, upholstered chair, framed picture), Watteau's hard-pressed to find unadulterated nature to imitate in this
monkey painter, his own nature under wraps, looks to a monkey painter's circumscribed milieu.
costumed mock-up of a model for inspiration but remains That the milieu evoked is Watteau's own is indicated by the
inert before it. Clues to his aims (and the contents of his hanging picture, a variant on one of Watteau's own works,
turned-away canvas) exist in both his lay figure's theatrical Pour garder Vhonneur d'une belle.22 La peinture is self-portrait as
5 Francois de Troy, Elisabeth Charlotte of Bavaria, Princess of the

Palatine, Duchess of Orleans, 1680, oil on canvas, 59 X 70 V6 in.
(150 X 178 cm). Chateaux de Versailles et de Trianon,
Versailles (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided
by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art Resource, NY)
well as allegory, and its portrayal of a natural creature

under Art's thumb, stymied before the simulacrum meant to
inspire, surely harks back to the painter's beginnings, when
Watteau worked as a copyist, painted theatrical works with 0amei de la Cowr.
Gillot, and aped Parisian academics well enough to earn their Odanj {air.' nobit de cettt 60amcf Jipoiir*eUe nn gaiaj{b Jeirfiammt
approbation.24 Beyond that, it may reflect the mature artist's Jôji n/aitde bonnes quaiittZ^ \ StJhutJen prenBre aj-abcaute .
recognition of the complicated interplay of nature and art, as 6 Nicolas Bonnart, Dame de la Cour, from Recueil des modes de
well as the difficulty of reconciling their competing demands la cour de France, ca. 1678-93, hand-colored engraving on
in his work. paper, 14% X 9% in. (36.5 X 23.8 cm). Los Angeles County
For while Watteau's unique contribution, the fete galante, Museum of Art, Los Angeles, purchased with funds provided
by the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. H.
was grounded in art (painterly and theatrical) rather than
Tony Oppenheimer, Mr. and Mrs. Reed Oppenheimer, Hal
nature, he routinely tempered such scenes' inherent artifice Oppenheimer, Alice and Nahum Lainer, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald
with actuality in the form of people, places, and incidents he Oppenheimer, Ricki and Marvin Ring, Mr. and Mrs. David
had observed. At least one of his contemporaries acknowl Sydorick, The Costume Council Fund, and Members of the
edged his efforts in that vein, deeming the fetes galantes' Costume Council (artwork in the public domain; photograph
? Museum Associates / LACMA)
adroit fusion of art and nature Watteau's crowning achieve
ment: some fifteen years after the painter's death, the abbe
de La Marre memorialized him in "L'Art et la Nature reunis
par Watteau" (1736), a poem that fancifully recalls the truce society enrich a meditation on exclusion he already had set in
the artist negotiated between long-estranged antagonists. Af play in the paintings that most clearly anticipate it: in both
ter outlining these principals' objections to one another? Pour nous prouvons and Le prelude au concert the painter por
Nature reproached Art for its finery and affectation, while trays exclusivity as experienced by the insiders who enjoy its
sleek Art turned its nose up at Nature's rusticity?La Marre insular comforts, as well as by the outsiders whose very exis
suggests that the two were about to come to blows when tence is its prerequisite.27
Watteau coaxed their reconciliation, inviting them to "come The insiders' realm that dominates the left side of Les
over to my place and make peace."25 charmes de la vie has roots in the pair of figures that anchors
Although the poet concludes that, thanks to Watteau, Art the lower left corner of Pour nous prouvons que cette belle, a
became more beautiful and Nature more perfect,26 their smaller and less complex antecedent that shows five large
alliance in the fetes galantes is not always so seamless as La scale figures against a ground of pastel clouds (Fig. 2). Cou
Marre would have us believe. In Les charmes de la vie, for pled by their physical proximity and consonant gazes, the
instance, particularized joins between the natural and the young man and woman on the painting's left side merge as a
cultural are disclosed rather than smoothed away, as admix stable pyramidal configuration. While the restrained recti
tures of rawness and refinement lend tension to an otherwise tude signaled by the woman's tucked-down chin and erect
anodyne vision of civilized contentment. Watteau's subtle posture contrasts with the easy intimacy with which her com
acknowledgments there of small pulls in the fabric of polite panion leans against her, the two are clearly on the same
ANTOINE WATTEAU AND LES CHARMES DE LA VIE
7 Claude III Audran, Singerie for the

Berceau des singes at the Chateau de
Marly (destroyed), 1709-10, red chalk,
black lead, and wash, 28% X 21 in.
(73.4 X 53.3 cm). Nationalmuseum,
Stockholm (artwork in the public
domain, photograph ? National
Museum of Fine Arts, Picture Library)
page. Absorbed in her songbook and one another, theyThe social fate of Pour nous prouvons's tuner is sealed as
appear oblivious to the lutenist, who is in many ways their much by his flushed face and tensed fingers as by his techni
antithesis: his solitariness underscores their togetherness,cal deficiencies, for cultivated nonchalance was as essential to
and his jutting limbs, off-kilter stance, and flustered expres aristocratic self-presentation as calculated naturalness.30
sion set off the composure?and closure?of their postures Thus, as Mary Vidal observes, aristocratic music makers
and gazes. Whereas they are emphatically attuned, he, grap tended toward easy-to-play instruments that required neither
pling with his instrument, is literally and figuratively out of"complex crossfingering nor the physical effort of strenuous
tune, his attempt to become a player effortful and evenbreathing."31 One seventeenth-century arbiter of manners
laughable (as indicated by the mirth of the child beside him). specifically warned against manifestations of zeal or enter
The lute he brandishes as a tool of entree is large and prise: "People who attempt difficult things should go about it
none-too-subtly phallic,28 and the clumsiness of his endeavor in such an easy way that we are left with the feeling that it
to subjugate it speaks to both his lack of skill as an instrudoesn't cost them any effort. . . . Although we may sense the
effort, as long as it is not visible it can do no harm."32 To
mentalist and a broader ineptitude that presumably extends
to the social and romantic realms in which the pair at left are
publicly strive, let alone strain in the manner of this lutenist,
so cozily ensconced.29 betrayed one's inferiority and invited the sophisticate's
8 Teniers the Younger, The Monkey Painter, oil on wood, 9Vi X

14r/8 in. (24 X 37 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid (artwork in
the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by
Art Resource, NY)
scorn?though Watteau's musician fails to attract even that;

despite his looming closeness, he is unacknowledged by the
picture's other adults.
This struggling musician fares no better in Le prelude au
concert, where his lute becomes a theorbo (Fig. 3).33 Indeed, 9 Louis Desplaces, engraving after Watteau, La peinture. Ecole
Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (artwork in the
his isolation seems more pronounced in the second painting,
public domain)
which is an enlargement of Pour nous prouvons in both phys
ical dimensions and perspectival space. Its expanded setting
recalls many seventeenth-century terrace scenes;34 at the
same time, Le prelude au concert probably reflected life in the smaller child focuses on the dog she feeds?in a configura
Parisian suburbs. By the time he painted it, Watteau was tion suggestive of compliance and its rewards.
familiar with at least one country estate in the environs of In European art and emblem books, trained dogs often are
Paris: Montmorency, the property north of the city that was identified as such by postures of supplication. The begging
owned by financier Pierre Crozat, the connoisseur-collector dog was a symbol of education,38 and many such pets appear
who was Watteau's patron in the 1710s.35 Watteau made in Flemish and Dutch children's portraits. The pairing of
Montmorency's gardens, designed by Andre Le Notre,36 the child and dog reflects a long-standing view that both children
subject of several drawings and a painting, The Perspective and dogs are "natural" creatures that need training for entry
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). into the civilized spaces of well-reared adults39?an Aristote
Like its setting, the population of Le prelude au concert is an lian notion elaborated in Plutarch's De liberis educandis, which
expansion upon that of Pour nous prouvons: two adults have was widely read in the early modern era.40 By way of illustra
been added at left, and they, along with a girl seen from tion, Plutarch cites an experiment conducted by Lycurgus, a
behind, bracket a closed circle that includes a second child, king of Sparta, who used two dogs from the same litter,
a dog, and a seventh human visage in the form of a stone differently reared, to demonstrate the benefits of education,
bust. As in Pour nous prouvons, the cohesiveness of this left which only one of the pups received. In Renaissance and
ward group offsets the instrument tuner's awkward singular Baroque visual culture, Lycurgus's experiment was widely
ity. Moreover, several of them gaze together at a music book? referenced as a metaphor for child rearing, and begging dogs
a repository of prescribed practice and accepted form to became what Jan Baptist Bedaux calls "standard attributes" of
which the theorboist apparently is not privy. The seated man "nature corrected by training or, in other words, by instruc
in their midst holds a violin that renders the tuner's success tion and education."41 Tapping this well-established trope,
or lack thereof moot, since the violinist and book-holding the child-and-dog configuration of Le prelude au concert al
singer are equipped to make music on their own. ludes to learned propriety that both contrasts with and un
Abandoned by the violoncello player with whom he would derscores the theorboist's imperfect mastery of the sorts of
play continuo,37 the theorbo player is disregarded; only the performances society's upper echelons inculcated early on
disused instrument leans his way. The violoncello rests and expected from even their lowliest members.
propped, like him, on a tabouret, its neck and bow echoing? Despite his compositional centrality, the tuner of Le prelude
and perhaps subtly mocking?the musician's angular thrusts. is consigned to social Siberia?stymied in his effort to join the
The stone bust, meantime, literally overlooks him, and the group at left and at some distance from the spheres of
ANTOINE WATTEAU AND LES CHARMES DE LA VIE 55
sociability represented by a couple on the grass behind the children who, like the lapdog, are well-bred, well-groomed,
violoncello and the convivial group in the right midground. and in the process of being educated). Then comes the
He is not the only protagonist in Watteau 's oeuvre to enjoy aspiring but imperfectly polished (and possibly ill-bred) mu
compositional centrality even as he experiences social nul sician, and finally a servile youth of non-European origin.
lity,42 and one suspects the artist appreciated this irony; his (The figures' postures affirm their respective social posi
decision to light Le prelude's theorboist from both front and tions.)
back would seem to highlight the figure's isolation. While the This human array, interspersed with dogs of appropriately
majority of Le prelude's figures occupy shadowy pockets con distinct demeanors, is set against a parkscape?a swath of
ducive to intimacy and stealth, the brash burst of light behind vegetation that is as much about art as nature. Sandwiched
the central one lends flamboyance to his ham-handedness. between imposing terrace and distant town, Les charmes's
Watteau apparently was both pleased and dissatisfied midground greenery looks to have been inspired by both
enough with Le prelude au concert to rework the scene in the Italian landscape paintings and by gardens designed with
picture now known as Les charmes de la vie, a painting in which such pictures in mind.47 Venetian pastorals were especially
the still-tuning musician remains estranged from a close-knit fashionable in Watteau's Paris, lauded by theorist Roger de
group at left. That group, strongly reminiscent of the one Piles, collected by the regent, Philippe d'Orleans, and by his
developed in Le prelude, was nonetheless rethought: although sometime-arts-adviser Crozat, and championed by venerable
the postures and placement of children and lapdog remain academician Charles de La Fosse.48 La Fosse took Watteau
the same, each of the adult figures is new to the composition. under his wing about 1712 and probably was responsible for
The reserved singer transferred from Pour nous prouvons to Le introducing him to Crozat; Watteau's own interest in the
prelude is replaced, in Les charmes, by a female guitarist, who Venetian school spiked after Crozat returned from an Italian
apparently will accompany herself and perform without a text sojourn with a vast trove of landscape drawings in 1715.49
(the books of Les charmes being stacked near the violoncello). Watteau's subsequent landscapes reflect his study of Crozat's
Behind her stands a stout middle-aged man whose demeanor, holdings. Some bear topography and buildings drawn from
costume, and stolidity?as well as his backing by a weighty specific works;50 others are generally Venetian in their lack of
column?denote power and authority. Based on a drawing of distinct narrative,51 their Arcadian aspect, and their evoca
Watteau's painter friend Nicholas Vleughels, this figure rests tion of what scholars have variously described as an "unequiv
a proprietary hand on the guitarist's chair, but unlike the ocally idealized" "dream world" and "ideal land of lovers."52
doting lover of Pour nous prouvons, looks beyond his seated The park of Les charmes de la vie is such a place, its vaporous
companion to gaze directly at the instrument tuner.43 precincts and cloud-hung sky phantasmic. Like its human
Le prelude's theorboist?clearly a success in Watteau's and animal components, Les charmes's landscape constitutes
eyes?was transferred verbatim to Les charmes.44 Yet without an instance of nature subjugated by culture, and, as a sum of
moving a muscle of the figure's face or body, or changing his these parts, the painting can be seen to address the range of
placement within the composition, Watteau repositioned society's civilizing designs.
him in a social sense: the tuner's presence here is registered Watteau situates Les charmes'$ compendium of variously
by the painting's most prepossessing aristocrat, and his status cultivated living things within a man-made frame: a Baroque
is boosted by Watteau's addition, to Les charmes, of a black portico, the clearly delineated architecture of which gives Les
servant and a flea-bitten dog. These last, by virtue of being charmes more formality and structure than Le prelude au con
beyond the pale, establish the theorboist's proximity to it, the cert. Its ornate pavement orders and deepens the foreground
pale, in this case, being the line demarcating polite society. space with geometric patterns that contrast the vagaries of
This expanded figural hierarchy renders the central figure of the gauzy lawn beyond, and the asymmetry of the depicted
Les charmes its thematic as well as formal middleman: perched colonnade further weights the composition's left side. Over
at the juncture of high and low life, of refinement and its powering the scene's organic components in both scale and
lack, the theorboist embodies?with apt awkwardness?a tip substantiality, this architectural surround lays additional
ping point. stress on human craft and accomplishment in a scene already
Although the themes of courtship and exclusivity devel dominated by them.
oped in Pour nous prouvons and Le prelude are replayed in Les Les charmes's portico, like Watteau's changes to its leftward
charmes, they are there adjoined, even overshadowed, by group, was a departure from Le prelude that the painter envi
Watteau's portrayal of a continuum of cultivation in contem sioned early on.53 It was only as he worked toward completion
porary society. In a period marked by widespread interest in of his retooled composition, however, that the painter chose
the categorization of creation, this sort of continuum, known to eliminate midground figures he had transferred from Le
from antiquity as the Great Chain of Being,45 was discussed by prelude and add the dog and servant of Les charmes's right
men of letters as well as natural scientists. As Europeans foreground.54 Donald Posner seems to relegate these late
became increasingly aware of human diversity, "racial" dis comers to the status of Staffage: "The architectural elements
tinctions were discerned not only among Caucasians, Asians, and introduction of a dog and a servant with a wine cooler . . .
and Africans but also among classes.46 Watteau does not give the setting [of Les charmes] a greater verisimilitude than
categorize with that sort of specificity, but the panorama of its model [Leprelude],,"55 He is not altogether wrong; the dog,
human types presented in Les charmes de la vie nonetheless despite a sterling artistic pedigree (Watteau lifted it from
reads as a hierarchy that begins at far left with the lord of the Peter Paul Rubens's Coronation of Marie de Medicis, Fig. 1056),
manor and proceeds to his accomplished consort and well strikes a note of earthy reality, and the serving boy, while
heeled entourage (including apprentice elites in the form of descended from a long line of exotic pages (painted by artists
10 Peter Paul Rubens, The Coronation

of Marie de Medicis at Saint-Denis, 1621?
25, oil on canvas, 12 ft. HVs in. X
23 ft. \0Va in. (3.94 X 7.27 m). Musee
du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the
public domain; photograph by
Christian Jean / Herve Lewandowski,
provided by the Reunion des Musees
Nationaux / Art Resource, NY)
11 Watteau, Three Studies of a Black Youth, ca. 1717, red and

black chalk and wash, 95/s X 105/s in. (24.4 X 27.1 cm). Musee
du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph
by Michele Bellot, provided by the Reunion des Musees
Nationaux / Art Resource, NY)
12 Paolo Veronese, The Marriage at Cana (detail), 1562-63, oil

on canvas, 21 ft. WA in. X 32 ft. 5% in. (6.66 X 9.9 m). Musee
from Titian and Anthony Van Dyck to Francois de Troy) ,57 du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph
was?as Watteau's drawings make clear?modeled by an ac provided by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art
tual person (Fig. 11). Resource, NY)
It is often suggested that those few black servants who
appear in Watteau's work were inspired by servers in Paolo
Veronese's feast scenes (Fig. 12).58 Indeed, Watteau made Northern precedents also may have inspired black ser
dozens of drawings after Italian works in the 1710s, one of vants' inclusion in some fetes galantes. Rubens drew Africans
which includes a black figure drawn from Veronese's Christ and included a black attendant in his Venus with a Mirror
and the Centurion (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, (Sammlung F?rst von Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechten
Mo.). Notably, though, the attendant figure Watteau lifted stein).60 Less famously (but more like Watteau in Les charmes
from that picture for transfer into his own Plaisirs du hol de la vie), David Vinckboons placed a black wine steward in
(Dulwich Picture Gallery, London)?the only servant he is the foreground of La fete seigneuriale, a now-lost painting that
known to have borrowed directly from Veronese?is not is known through a copy (Fig. 13). Vinckboons's work was
black,59 and the black boy who appears as a small detail in the popular among Parisian collectors and more widely known
upper right corner of Plaisirs du bal wears a turban, whereas through engravings, so it is possible Watteau had seen his Fete
Veronese's black servants typically are bareheaded. seigneuriale in some form.61
Although the pairing, placement, and outdoor situation of

the servant and wine tub of Les charmes de la vie recall (fortu
itously?) those of Vinckboons's Fete seigneuriale, Watteau's
black youth is much more convincingly actual than that
painting's exotic type. Similarly, whereas the black servants of
Veronese's oeuvre are very much of a piece (redundant in
physiognomy, actions, demeanor), their counterpart in Les
charmes is convincingly individualized?quite different in age,
features, attitude, and costume from the black attendant
Watteau included in his Conversation (Fig. 14), an earlier
depiction of outdoor socializing. The black youth of Les
charmes in fact more closely resembles La conversations white
serving boy than its servant of color.
It seems likely that the idea of the black attendant as an
emblem of cosmopolitan chic?a familiar trope of both Ital
ian and northern art62 and an increasingly common addition
to French fashion prints (Fig. 6), portraits (Figs. 5, 15), and
decorative pieces (Figs. 16, 1763)?led Watteau to invent the
exotic servant included in La conversation. Like Veronese's 13 After David Vinckboons, La seigneuriale, detail, 1612-13,
suave serving men, Vinckboons's obliging boy, and the ex oil on copper, 19% X 261/s in. (49.7 X 66.5 cm). Musee des
Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing, France (artwork in the public domain)
travagantly garbed servants seen in late-seventeenth-century
French art, the turban-wearing servant of La conversation is
more sign than individual. But in the five or so years that
stand between Watteau's Conversation and his work on Les on drawings of actual people,65 and it is unclear which of
charmes, reality clearly intervened in the form of a black them?if any?is playing her- or himself. Rather than ampli
model, whose physical actualities tempered a preexisting fying the scene's "reality," Vleughels's appearance there as a
mental construct and enhanced the "verisimilitude" Posner world-weary seigneur?a masquerade of sorts, surely66?in
ascribes to the later work. fact undermines belief in its actuality, since viewer recogni
In a similar vein, Helmut B?rsch-Supan has argued that tion that his impersonation of an aristocrat is an artful fiction
Watteau's inclusion, in Les charmes, of his readily recognizable raises the possibility that other figures of Les charmes are
friend Vleughels "makes the whole scene more concrete" likewise enacted, including the black servant. Still, whether
than its immediate antecedent, Le prelude au concert!04 Yet his young model served a household Watteau frequented or
most of the foreground characters of Les charmes were based was merely role-playing for the artist, the silk-liveried youth
^ ^ Vyt^ 9BBBBB1
14 Watteau, La conversation, ^^^^^^^^^^^Bi^tm^$^^^^^^K^^^^m? ifl^^^^^^^^^^^HHHH^HH^HHfl
on 19% ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^|^^^^^^^^^^^^^y^fl^^^^^^^^^^^^H^^^^^^^B
X Toledo Museum ^^^^^^^^^H^H^^^^^^|^^^Hk|^
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15 Claude-Francois Vignon, Francoise

Marie de Bourbon and Louise-Frangoise de
Bourbon, ca. 1690, oil on canvas, 50%
X 36V4 in. (129 X 92 cm). Chateau de
Versailles (artwork in the public
domain; photograph provided by the
Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Art
Resource, NY)
undeniably embodied a contemporary reality. Though sla European courts and capitals?and his own reputed taste for
very technically was banned in France, negres were becoming them, doubtless fueled the vogue of black servants in eigh
more common accoutrements of aristocratic life in Watteau's teenth-century Paris.78 Even if many of the black attendants
Paris, and changes to governmental policy in the very years who appear in prints and paintings made in Louis XIV's reign
that separate La conversation from Les charmes de la vie may were drawn from extant images rather than in-person en
have materially altered Watteau's access to black models. counters, their inclusion there indicates the cachet of slave
The official line, as framed in 1571, was that "France, the ownership.
mother of liberty, can admit of no slaves."67 Those who toiled Originally prized as rare commodities that bespoke colo
on faraway Caribbean plantations, in the service of France's nial riches and burgeoning cosmopolitanism, negres became
burgeoning colonial economy, were conveniently unaffected somewhat less rare in France in the early eighteenth century.
by antislavery rhetoric and policies within the motherland Though modern scholars are quick to note a paucity of
(and subject instead to the provisions of the colonial Code documentation when assessing the number of Africans in
Noir68), but prior to the issuance of the regent's Edict of 1716 France in the eighteenth century,79 black slaves' numbers?
(which allowed the controlled importation of black servi and petitions for freedom?were such that the Regency gov
tors),69 slaves who found themselves on French soil were ernment (1715-23) was pressed, in its first year, to clarify the
entitled to petition for freedom?and often won it.70 Seen status of colonial slaves in France. It responded by affirming
but occasionally in France from the sixteenth to mid-seven the rights of their masters to make use of them on French soil
teenth century (and then more often in Nantes and Bor without fear of losing them; the Edict of 1716 permitted
deaux than in Paris71), people of African descent had arrived Frenchmen with colonial connections (Caribbean landhold
there more regularly as the country's colonial reliance on ings, governmental posts, and/or military commissions) to
ample cheap labor?hence its commerce with West Africa? maintain ownership of slaves they brought into France (or
took off in the later 1600s.72 During the reign of Louis XIV, sent to France to serve relatives and friends) so long as such
black slaves visited the French court as members of African slaves were registered with the Admiralty Office and trained
entourages;73 accompanied their colonial masters on visits to in Catholicism and/or a trade while resident in the kingdom.
France; and occasionally were presented outright as gifts to In effect, the edict annulled colonial slaves' onetime right to
people of rank (the king's wife, Marie Therese, was given a seek freedom while traveling or living in France.
black boy in 166374). Although there may have been some expectation that
Although Louis XIV was credited, in 1710, with the desire blacks admitted to France under the terms of the Edict of
"that Negroes and Negresses should enjoy in France the same 1716 would return to the colonies once indoctrinated and/or
liberty as his other subjects"75 and proved amenable to peti trained, many never did.80 (This was especially true of those
tions from individual colonial slaves who sought freedom who had ventured from the port cities to Paris?even though
once arrived there,76 his intimates' penchant for dark the Parisian parlement [high court] refused to register the
skinned minions (Fig. 15)77?a preference matched at other Edict of 1716.81) Thus, without truly regulating slaves' com
ANTOINE WATTEAU AND EES CHARMES DE LA VIE ?O,
16 Hyacinthe Rigaud, Black Youth, oil on canvas, ca. 1710, 22V4 17 Antoine Coypel, Black Boy with Fruit, ca. 1682, oil on wood,
X 16% in. (56.5 X 43 cm). Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dunkerque 11 X 8]/2 in. (28 X 21.5 cm). Musee du Louvre, Paris (artwork
(artwork in the public domain; photograph by Daniel in the public domain; photograph provided by the Reunion
Arnaudet, provided by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux / des Musees Nationaux / Art Resource, NY)
Art Resource, NY)
and monkey in Antoine Coypel's Black Boy with Fruit (Fig.

ings and goings, the edict legitimized an entitled elite's desire 17)?and possibly by Audran in the singeries he and Watteau
to, as Sue Peabody puts it, "retain enslaved domestic servants concocted for the Chateau de Marly, in which cheerful mon
in France indefinitely, as a symbol of wealth and status,"82 and key servants cook and serve, as well as chilling and decanting
ensured?if inadvertently?the growth of France's black pop wine (Fig. 7).
ulation, which was surely on the rise when Watteau, some Although Coypel's black boy seems most closely allied to
months after the edict's issuance, found the black model the monkeys who adjoin him in a dark, sprawling fore
whom he used for the servant of Les charmes de la vie.83 ground, he might also be compared to the lapdog at left, a
Over the course of the eighteenth century, black servants' creature whose frisky naturalness (suggested by its bright,
popularity would increase in seemingly direct proportion to distracted gaze and lolling tongue) seems contained by its
French philosophical commitment to egalitfr,84 the negres fair mistress's civilizing touch. Certainly, the slave in Philippe
manifest otherness, once merely exotic, came to provide Vignon's portrait of Louis XIV's daughters (Fig. 15) is point
justification for his servitude.85 As Yi-Fu Tuan observes, when edly likened to that painting's dog; Vignon's unctuous twin
"one group dominates another . . . myths emerge to make ning of the pretty sisters finds a not-so-pretty counterpoint in
inequality acceptable, even right, to both parties," and wide his pairing of the picture's smaller and considerably darker
spread European "association of dark skin with animality or entities, whose bug-eyed animation and bared teeth disclose
childishness" served that purpose.86 Servants, as a class, had residual wildness. Much as their inkiness underscores the
long been compared to animals, but black servants in eigh women's fashionable, powdered whiteness, the unsettled de
teenth-century Paris?especially young boys (favored over meanors of the servant and the dog stress the sisters' poise.
black girls)?were treated more like domesticated pets than A long-standing French equation of servants and dogs
beasts (of burden or of the barnyard). Since, as Henry Louis resided in the sort of mutual rambunctiousness to which
Gates Jr. notes, eighteenth-century debate on the Great Vignon alludes. Cissie Fairchilds asserts, however, that young
Chain of Being tended to position the African "just above? black minions were considered more endearingly canine (play
or parallel to?that place reserved for the 'orang-outang,' " it ful, winsome, and easily brought to heel) than other domestic
is not surprising that people of color were most often equated servants and "indulged" like pedigreed pets.88 Often obliged
with monkeys,87 as suggested by the configuration of slave to wear collars of the sort sported by rich men's dogs (Figs.
18 David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life with

Portrait, ca. 1650, oil on canvas, 37% X
45% in. (95 X 116 cm). Herbert F.
Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell
University, Ithaca, N.Y., gift of Louis
V. Keeler, Class of 1911, and Mrs.
Keeler, by exchange (artwork in the
public domain; photograph provided
by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum,
Cornell University)
15, 16) ,89 black servants,

surviving Fairch
registr
ered "doglike" ing
in their
in "unswe
France in
their owners."90
to fourteen.91
Among black domestics,
more petits
malleable n
th
the age portrayed
of a by de
cuter, Troy
less t
Rigaud, and Watteau?were
lacked the the
streng
ANTOINE WATTEAU AND EES CHARMES DE LA VIE 71
for real labor, young attendants were conspicuously orna

mental, their lack of use value marking them as objets de luxe
rather than practical necessities. This attitude toward black
children was not particularly French; David Bailly's Vanitas
Still Life with Portrait (Fig. 18), a display of worldly possessions
that includes a black youth, is one of several Dutch manifes
tations,92 and William Hogarth's Taste in High Life (Fig. 19)
satirizes the elite Briton's notion that a child of color was just
another piece of exotic bric-a-brac by pointedly comparing its
turbaned black boy to the diminutive and amusingly gro
tesque blanc de chine figurine he holds.93
Hogarth's boy also is comparable to the foreground mon
key in Taste in High Life?an exotic pet of similar scale who,
though a creature of nature, is clothed, in amusingly imper
fect imitation of his owners.94 By the end of the eighteenth
century, as novelist and social commentator Louis-Sebastien 20 A Lady at Her Toilette, mid-18th century. Bibliotheque
Mercier reported in Tableau de Paris (1782-83), petits negres Nationale de France, Paris (artwork in the public domain)
would supersede monkeys, parrots, and pedigreed dogs and
cats in the hearts of fashionable Parisiennes.95 Mercier con
jectured that part of the attraction was the "ebony" atten
dant's ability to point up a beauty's "dazzling whiteness," particular place and time," nonetheless warns against reading
repeating a well-established trope that, as Ben Jonson ob his tableaux as true to life. "Rather than reproductions of
served, "a dark foyle . . . best sets a diamond forth."96 In reality," Plax maintains, the fetes galantes are "artful re-cre
addition to accentuating fairness by embodying its opposite ations."102 The viewer's sense of Les charmes as an "artful
(as in Fig. 15), the black boy's color (which marked him as a re-creation" is heightened by the stagelike foreground formed
species apart) and youth (thus, his assumed lack of full by its paving and columns,103 as well as the flatness of the
fledged sexuality) sanctioned a remarkable degree of inti landscape beyond, which has the look of a backdrop. This
macy between him and his white mistress, the physical nature effect (perhaps a deliberate allusion to stagecraft) "pro
of which Mercier recounted in titillating detail.97 Gallant motes," in Plax's view, an "understanding of the terrace as a
prints of the later eighteenth century demonstrate that stage and the costumed figures as actors."104
French ladies' fond attachments to their slaves fueled scur This "understanding" (supported by knowledge of Watteau's
rilous speculation on the erotic dimensions of the easy affec earlier involvement with the theater) suggests the painting
tion Mercier describes; one such image shows a semiclad but was thoughtfully cast and choreographed, as does evidence of
bewigged woman in the midst of a most personal toilette the artist's sustained process of rethinking its characters and
attended by a negrillon whose dropped trousers reveal his composition. Surely, then, the prominently positioned dog
enthusiasm for his work (Fig. 20) ,98 and servant do more than set the scene. Fewer in number
Custom dictated that black minions be extravagantly than its elite participants, these latecomers to Watteau's mu
dressed; Tuan writes that "by the eighteenth century, ornate sic party command equal space and attention, thereby shift
livery had come to be an insignia of black, as distinct from ing the compositional balance of Les charmes de la vie even as
white, servitude."99 Like the common practice of giving slaves they reinforce its power balance. Outsiders both, spaniel and
high-flown monikers like Pompey, Socrates, or Scipio, dress boy act as foils to the insider set at left, whose clubby solidarity
ing them in finery might be seen as an act of irony, which is underscored not only by the isolation of the theorbo tuner
amused by playfully pitting the trappings of gentility against but also by the conspicuous singularity of untoward animal
the innate and insuperable savageness of the non-Euro and black youth.
pean.100 The servant of Les charmes de la vie is thus attired The dog, as noted, was borrowed from Rubens; it is one of
comme il faut, though his understated garb (satiny, but simply a pair included in the large coronation scene that figures in
cut, unembellished, and unpatterned) and lack of turban that artist's Marie de Medicis cycle of 1621-25. In a series that
make his ensemble less exuberantly and stereotypically exotic features several dogs, those in the foreground of The Corona
than that of most black servants portrayed in this period?by tion (Fig. 10) strike an odd note amid the pomp of the
Watteau himself in La conversation, in fashion plates by Nico ceremony, its elegant participants, and the winged genii that
las Bonnart and others, and in paintings by de Troy, Coypel, establish the painting's allegorical tenor. Perhaps designed as
and Rigaud?a possible indication that the clothing worn by a subtle corrective to the bombast Rubens felt obliged to offer
the servant in Les charmes is more veristic than formulaic. the queen,105 the dogs, particularly the flea-bitten one Watteau
All that being said, Posner's assertion that the slave and favored, make a homely counterbalance to the grandiloquent
large dog lend "verisimilitude" to Les charmes de la vie is a spectacle. They might also be seen as contrast to the lapdogs
limited and limiting explanation of their presence there. As that appear in scenes highlighting Marie's more submissive
Posner himself notes, Watteau's fetes galantes "touched, but side: Marriage by Proxy and An Offer of Negotiation (in which
did not rest, on the actual appearance of contemporary Marie makes peace with her son Louis XIII). Similarly, the
life";101 more recently, Julie Anne Plax, who ratifies the no Rubensian spaniel of Les charmes de la vie may be read as a
tion of a "historical" Watteau, "rooted in and responding to a counterpoint to the smaller dog of that picture, where (in
21 Watteau, GersainVs Shop Sign, 1720,

oil on canvas, 641/s X 121 lA in. (163 X
308 cm). Schloss Charlottenburg, Stif
tung Preussische Schl?sser und G?rten
Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin (artwork
in the public domain; photograph by
J?rg P. Anders, provided by the Bildar
chiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art
Resource, NY)
them, exemplify nature aestheticized (skin powdered, natu

ral hair dressed and/or concealed, bodies elegantly clad and
shod and self-consciously positioned), whereas the working
men at left (who straddle shop and street) present progres
sively coarser variations on human nature, and the dog drawn
from Rubens?low-down and marginal in the Shop Sign?
reminds the viewer of nature's persistence at the edges of
urbanity. In that respect, the Shop Signs dog reprises the role
of its twin in Les charmes de la vie as well as that of the black boy
stationed in Les charmes s right corner. For unlike Coypel's
centralized and frankly decorative servant (Fig. 17), whom
Fairchilds compares to a pampered pet,107 the servant of Les
charmes is situated on the margin, far closer to the "outdoor
dog"108 than to the lapdog and its white mistress.
Watteau's servant of color seems a more complex and
wide-ranging sign than Coypel's, but like him?and like the
boy in Bailly's still life?the black youth of Les charmes consti
22 Nicolas Lancret, Fete champetm La collation, ca. 1725, oil on
canvas, 297/a X 40 in. (75.9 X 101.6 cm). Indiana University tutes a show of wealth, more particularly, newfound riches of
Art Museum, Bloomington, gift of K. T. Keller, 65.79 (artwork colonial origins.109 He is also, like the black boy satirized in
in the public domain) Hogarth's Taste in High Life, a marker of cosmopolitan taste,
though one more closely linked to the exotic servitors of
older European art than to the drolleries of Chinese knick
tentionally or not) Watteau echoes Lycurgus in his presenta knacks. Finally, like the children in the works of both Bailly
tion of a good dog-bad dog dialectic. Les charmes's lapdog, an and Hogarth, the negrillon of Les charmes de la vie is an image
embodiment of nature curbed and "corrected" by education, of nonindigenous nature aestheticized. While Watteau does
sets a standard of which the untutored spaniel seems happily not blatantly satirize the practice of collecting a boy as if he
unaware. Closed in on itself as it attends to bodily demands, were a nautilus shell and displaying him in the equivalent of
the larger dog, self-absorbed and isolated, bespeaks the social a fancy mount, Les charmes carries indications that its artist
ramifications of improper upbringing as well as the potential may have sought to probe beneath the surface sheen of the
unsightliness of nature untamed. Its placement behind the human being-cwr/z-collectible.
theorboist (whom the animal literally "shadows") emphasizes Les charmes's servant is captured in midaction, his agile
the unappealing doggedness of the musician's own quest and posture catlike or, more probably, simian, since it finds an
hints at mutual lack of breeding. antecedent in that of one of the monkey servers Audran
Though drawn from the domain of highest art, the spaniel devised for the Marly singerie (Fig. 7). Like the simian steward
of Les charmes is the antithesis of artfulness, a reading ratified at the lower left of Audran's drawing,110 Les charmes's servant
by Watteau's deployment of the same dog in GersainVs Shop hunkers beside a low, footless tub in which wine bottles chill
Sign (Fig. 21), which presents the salesroom of a friend's and extends his arms diagonally leftward across it. Both Au
gallery as an idealized realm of art?in the form of paintings, dran's monkey and Watteau's negre grasp bottles by their
objets, and an artfully got-up and posturing clientele.106 That necks?but the former seems blithely on task, the latter
painting's central figures, like many of the images behind distracted. Like many a black servitor in European party
23 Watteau, Les bergers, ca. 1716-17,

oil on canvas, 22 X 31% in. (56 X
81 cm). Schloss Charlottenburg,
Stiftung Preussische Schl?sser und
G?rten Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph by J?rg P. Anders,
provided by the Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art
Resource, NY)
scenes, Watteau's apparently will oversee distribution of seems, on second look, revelatory of sexual longing. Unem
love's elixir. Wine, courtship, and sexual intimacy have been phatically?perhaps even unwittingly?the boy, lost in his
considered complementary since antiquity,111 and Keith looking, tips his hand to the viewer by touching the bottle as
Moxey has shown that "drinking wine," more particularly, he might touch himself. Its dark-glassed neck, lipped and
chilled wine, was a common metaphor for lovemaking in corked, is phallic in its contours, orientation, and relation to
Netherlandish popular culture.112 As Vinckboons's Fete sei his body, especially when compared to the bottle grasped by
gneuriale shows (Fig. 13), this iconography endured. Oliver the saucy protagonist of the previously mentioned gallant
Banks labels the ubiquitous wine cooler of seventeenth-cen print (Fig. 20), who simultaneously appraises her servant's
tury party scenes an "erotic device,"113 and Teniers's Family erection, spreads her legs, and proffers her sponge. Though
Concert (Fig. 4), in which two bottles chill side by side, sug much less baldly stated by Watteau, metaphoric masturbation
gests that wine connoted, by extension, conjugal content may be deduced in this forwardmost gesture of Les charmes?a
ment.114 mindless act of touching that bespeaks "natural" desire im
The common pairing of black servants and wine?in im perfectly contained (comparable, then, to the nearby dog's
ages from the Renaissance through the Rococo (such as chewing).
Nicolas Lancret's Fete champetre: La collation, Fig. 22115)?may Euphemistic references to erotic desires and acts were
have to do with the libidinous associations of both. Wine routinely deployed in libertine literature and gallant imagery
fueled the sort of lust people of color were said to possess in of the later eighteenth century117 and publicly performed in
"natural" overabundance, and it loosened the social restraints popular theatricals of Watteau's own day.118 The bottle grasp
"savages" did not feel in the first place.116 It might also be said ing in Les charmes de la vie may be characterized as an instance
that wine, like the well-dressed slave, is a result of nature of what Philip Stewart labels "displacement," a common tactic
plucked, processed, and packaged by and for cultivated hu of eighteenth-century erotic code that relies on ambiguity to
mans?though the boy of Les charmes de la vie is somewhat less "maximize pleasure while minimizing responsibility and
"bottled up" than the intoxicating spirits he is charged with guilt." A provocative tidbit thus coded may be enjoyed or
dispensing. ignored as the consumer chooses, and its provider may claim
The boy's expression is muted, even vague, but his over innocence with the (winking) disclaimer that any risque in
the-shoulder gaze clearly is directed at the guitarist, indicat nuendo is inadvertent. Countless eighteenth-century texts
ing sly appreciation of her beauty. His interest in her corre and images address sexual matters obliquely, via playful hints
sponds to the Stereotypie notion that opposites attract, and and metaphors, adhering to a disingenuous decorum
more particularly alludes to the awe in which the dusky and whereby (in Stewart's words) "the veil reveals what it is pre
nature-bound supposedly held the fair and cultivated (Fig. tending to hide."119
5). The boy's body language indicates, at first glance, his Watteau, no stranger to winking double entendre, pro
ready response to a call for wine, yet no glasses are in evi duced a number of works today recognized as prurient. Some
dence and no one looks his way. Absent any indication of an update the bawdy symbology of Dutch and Flemish genre
order, the boy's actions are presumably inner-directed, and, pictures,120 others?including toilette scenes that, according
in combination with his surreptitious demeanor and the to Pierre Rosenberg, "must have been recognized as dis
languorous quality of his gaze, his hand-to-bottle gesture guised erotica by Watteau's contemporaries"121?apparently
corollaries to the seduction scenes that figure so prominently

in Watteau's fetes galantes.
Besides being in keeping with informed assessments of the
artist's proclivities, the discreet reference to masturbation in
the right corner of Les charmes de la vie finds a parallel in
Watteau's Les bergers (Fig. 23), the depiction of a rustic fete
where aristocrats cavort amid peasants who court with pro
nounced physicality. Self-absorbed arousal is forthrightly ref
erenced in that picture's forwardmost entity: a dog that un
abashedly licks its genitals. Describing this creature as "an
appropriate, if rather vulgar, symbolic adjunct," Posner im
plies that the dog of Les bergers, like that picture's peasants,
acts on instinctual, animal desire that "civilized" beings strive
to repress or hide. He discerns, moreover, a particular con
nection between Les bergers's dog and the adjacent young
man, noting, "The dog's action is possibly meant to suggest
the boy's state of arousal and longing."125 A similar function
might be surmised for the servant of Les charmes, whose
suggestive gesture may be read as a marginal gloss on the
flushed theorboist's intent fingering of his unwieldy and
uncooperative instrument.
That the serving boy of Les charmes de la vie should play the
role Watteau assigned to the dog of Les bergers is consistent
with contemporary equations of children and dogs and ser
vants and dogs, as well as with then-current notions of black
people's animality.126 The boy's underlying animal "na
ture"?hinted from the start by his physical proximity to Les
charmes s uncouth spaniel and by his pose, which echoes that
of Audran's monkey servant?is confirmed by his gaze and
24 Watteau, Voulez-vous triompher des belles? ca. 1715, oil on
gesture, which breach the veneer of decorum his costume
panel, \blA X 107/s in. (38.6 X 27.6 cm). The Wallace provides,127 much as the dog's bodily impulse (a bit less rude
Collection, London (artwork in the public domain; than that of its country cousin, but rude nonetheless) trumps
photograph provided by The Trustees of the Wallace its domestication.128 Similarly unmediated expressions of car
Collection)
nal impulse were routinely ascribed to people of color, held
to stem from their uncivilized state and lack of Christian
were inspired by private sessions with living models that morality129 as well as from the inherently abundant lustiness
Watteau enjoyed in the company of Caylus and the art lover of those who hailed from tropical climes.130
Nicolas Henin. In such situations, Caylus later reported, The stereotypical black man of libertine literature is a slave
Watteau let his hair down and became "a bit uncouth [un peu who, unencumbered by notions of gallantry, beds his white
berger]."122 Caylus knew whereof he spoke; this reputable mistress with a straightforward ardor she finds unique and
antiquarian and art lover was known to his contemporaries as thrilling, deploying talents to which his seventeenth-century
a libertine who, according to the academician Charles Pinot antecedent, the libidinous "Moor" of courtly ballets and
Duclos, was a "plebeianly robust" aficionado of low life and masques, frequently alluded.131 The black man ostensibly was
liked to venture "among the populace where it was filthi imbued with sexual swagger from birth; Les jeunes maures
est."123 amoureux (ca. 1628) features a troupe of cheeky negrillons who
A renowned storyteller, Caylus assumed a proletarian alter assure female audience members that small sacks can hold
ego in his best-known work, Histoire de Guillaume Cocher (ca. fine spices.132 Sophie Chalaye observes that not only was the
1730), the ribald memoir of a coachman whose longtime black lothario the most sexually candid of the seventeenth
service to highbrow clients makes him privy to quirks and century's stock types, but that daring white suitors of that
foibles they usually mask. In much the same spirit?if stiffer period's erotic farces routinely "blacked up" and donned
in form?Caylus's biographical discourse on Watteau (1748) Moorish costume when they wished to put Eros on the table,
touches on the private predilections of a public persona, delivering
l
their lewdest propositions under the cover of dark
ness.
intimating, for instance, that Watteau produced much
naughtier works than those in his oeuvre today deemed The Comedie Italienne?the theatrical form to which
risque. At the end of his life, according to Caylus, the artist Watteau's oeuvre most frequently alludes?features its ow
insisted on the destruction of works he himself considered blackface rogue in the figure of Harlequin, whose persona
lewd, and such reminiscences, in Rosenberg's opinion, indi referenced in several fetes galantes. Watteau's Voulez-vous trio
cate the painter's "depictions of salacious subjects may have pher des belles? (Fig. 24) centers, for instance, on a leerin
been more numerous than one would at first suspect."124 Harlequin (or Harlequin impersonator) whose mask is fig
Certainly, allusions to sexual desires and acts are predictable ratively if not literally askew. As impatient desire overrides an
25 Louis Jacob after Jean-Antoine

Watteau, engraving, Departure of the
Italian Comedians in 1697, 1729.
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen
zu Berlin (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by J?rg P.
Anders, provided by the Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art
Resource, NY)
pretense of propriety, this louche swain leans and gestures children, in turn, were widely viewed as savage beings of
toward an upright female companion who seems startled and unchecked appetite, their sexuality a subject of concern to
dismayed by his boldness. Identifiable by his diamond-pat moralists and educators140 and of mirthful titillation among
terned garb,134 Harlequin typically wore a black mask as well, jaded grownups.141 Stewart points out that eighteenth-cen
although Watteau and others sometimes showed him mask tury social convention rendered children's genitals "officially
less and African, as in Departure of the Italian Comedians in 1697 inoffensive, harmless, even amusing" and asserts that the
(Fig. 25135), in which the color and features of Harlequin's "seductive or even obscene gesture of a child can only be a
revealed face make his ethnicity clear. Such representations joke to adults."142 In light of this attitude, the unself-con
acknowledge the longtime belief that, as fabulist and play scious looking and reactive gesture of the servant in Les
wright Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian asserted in 1786, "The charmes de la vie?which race explains and youth excuses?
most realistic opinion is that [Harlequin] was originally an might be seen to comprise the sort of off-color jest many of
African slave," a view echoed by encyclopedist Jean-Francois Watteau's contemporaries enjoyed.
Marmontel in 1787.136 On a more serious note, and within the context of a
In his first incarnations, Harlequin often wore a phallus, meditation on sophisticated humans' civilizing designs, the
which, according to Gates, makes "connections between him boy's unchecked expressions of desire speak to the power of
and Western representations of the African even stronger."137 nature. In Les charmes de la vie?if more surreptitiously than in
That early costuming detail fuels Pierre Louis Ducharte's Voulez-vous triompher des belles??Watteau seems to wryly ac
speculation that Harlequin descended from the phallo knowledge the futility of some attempts to rein instinctual
phores of Roman antiquity, who donned outsize penises and behaviors. Much as the staid music party in the background
darkened their faces with soot or wine dregs when celebrat of Voulez-vous triompher des belles? (with its metaphoric refer
ing Bacchus and also when playing African slaves onstage. ences to love play) contrasts with its foreground's raw display,
Ducharte asserts that the eighteenth-century Harlequin's Les charmes's trained lapdog is countered by an urge-driven
mask "suggested a cat, a satyr, and the sort of negro that spaniel, and its mannerly white girls offset by a subtly insou
Renaissance painters portrayed,"138 and certainly the Harle ciant boy of color.
quin Marmontel described in 1787 tapped cliches of African Counterpoised in the mode of Lycurgus's dogs, the chil
ness: "The ideal Harlequin," Marmontel opined, "has the dren of Les charmes de la vie embody the well-reared and the
suppleness, agility and grace of a cat, along with a superficial unschooled. Watteau, however, would seem to ascribe the
coarseness that renders his actions more amusing; his role is differences between propriety and its lack to inequities of
that of a lackey?patient, faithful, credulous, greedy, always nature as well as to inequalities in nurture, since the servant's
in love, always getting into scrapes . . . distressing and consol gender as well as his race set him apart from Les charmes s
ing himself with the readiness of a child."139 young girls. Then, as now, young boys often were character
A slave to his nature as well as to his master, the black man ized as naturally unruly, and humanity's male members as
of European imagination was childishly immoderate. And sumed to be more sexually driven than their female counter
ety and his cranky, often petulant treatment of well-inten

tioned friends and patrons."146 One therefore presumes
Watteau's identification with the predicament of Les charmes's
central figure. Indeed, on the bases of the theorboist's shaky
social stance, his performative role, and his technical difficul
ties, it seems likely that the instrument tuner was conceived as
the painter's stand-in.
This supposition is supported by comparison of Les charmes
de la vie with two pictures it resembles, each of which includes
a self-portrait of its artist as a musician. The first is Teniers's
Family Concert on a Terrace (Fig. 4); Watteau's familiarity with
(and emulation of) this group portrait is signaled by echoes
of its pictorial components and their disposition in Les
charmes de la vie.147 A renowned musician, Teniers portrays
himself at his cello rather than his easel in Family Concert,148
where he occupies roughly the same position and promi
nence in his respective milieu as Watteau's theorboist.
Another picture that seems to shed light on Watteau's
identification with the tuning musician of Les charmes is his
own Les fetes venitiennes (Fig. 26), a contemporaneous work in
which Watteau cast himself as the musette player at far
right.149 Les fetes venitiennes is most clearly connected to Les
charmes de la vie by its inclusion of a fanciful portrait of
Watteau's friend Vleughels, whose distinctive profile graces
the turbaned figure at left. The Vleughels look-alikes in both
pictures occupy the left side, gazing over and beyond beau
tiful blondes (which each seems to claim as his own) to
26 Watteau, Les fetes venitiennes, ca. 1717, oil on canvas, 22 X
l8Vs in. (56 X 46 cm). National Gallery of Scotland, regard an awkward instrumentalist from afar. Technical ex
Edinburgh (artwork in the public domain) aminations have shown that the musette player of Les fetes
venitiennes was not originally conceived as so obvious a self
portrait; Watteau began by depicting him (like the theorboist
of Les charmes de la vie) as an anonymous type. As Les fetes
parts.143 The servant of Les charmes?not just a child, but a venitiennes neared completion, though, Watteau overpainted
black child and boy child?therefore embodies nature in an the figure's head,150 giving his own features to the wistful
especially indomitable form. In its understated way, Watteau's looking musician who fingers a phallic pipe. At the same
depiction implies what Vignon's portrait of Francoise-Marie time, the artist repainted the portly pasha with Vleughels's
and Louise-Francoise de Bourbon (Fig. 15) brashly asserts: a profile (perhaps in the service of some privatejoke151). Read
black boy's complete cultivation cannot be guaranteed, even ing backward, I would suggest that the self-identification that
in the hothouse of aristocratic society. Thus, the slave's posi Watteau confirmed by putting his face on the marginalized
tion at Les charmes's far right, where he may be seen to performer of Les fetes venitiennes already was nascent when he
represent the nether end of the nature-culture continuum devised the beleaguered instrumentalist of Pour nous prouvons
charted in its foreground figures. que cette belle, Le prelude au concert, and Les charmes de la vie.
It is the extremity of the black youth's outsiderness that That straining tuner?thrice-depicted, in progressively
makes a thematic middleman of the theorboist, who, with more ambitious compositions?might be said to embody the
one foot firmly planted on the side of nature, the other lifted artist's own ongoing struggle to find perfect pitch within the
toward the realm of culture, precariously straddles a bound rarefied and complexly coded environment he came to in
ary that was increasingly blurred in Watteau's Paris. That sort habit, a world in which a man of middling means and birth
of betwixt-and-between posture was one with which Watteau might achieve social standing by allying his "natural gift" to a
was well acquainted?by experience as well as observation. A measure of cultivation?and considerable work.152 The cen
workingman's son from northern France, he remained more trality of the tuner's striving?in Le prelude au concert as well as
Flemish than French in manner and accent.144 Provincially Les charmes de la vie?indicates that effortful artistry was not
trained, he struck peers as technically challenged, yet aided just an underlying component of Watteau's picture making
by what Caylus termed his "natural gift"145?and a knack for but an issue he sought to thematize. Working outside the
making the right connections?Watteau not only managed to confines of established allegory, the artist here touched on
achieve academic recognition and success but also found a issues he also raised in Lapeinture (Fig. 9); like that picture's
place in one of the Parisian art world's most erudite circles. emblematic monkey, Les charmes's aspiring musician looks
Despite alliances with the likes of Crozat and Caylus, and pitifully out of his element and psychically taxed by the
his resultant entree to certain fashionable gatherings, Watteau acculturation his surroundings imply.
remained socially ill at ease; as David Wakefield notes, those The theorboist's obvious travails temper Watteau's por
who knew him "agree on Watteau's gauche behavior in soci trayal of elite pleasures with a reminder of the painstaking
ANTOINE WATTEAU AND LES CHARMES DE LA VIE >jj
processes by which pleasure-giving production is fine-tuned; asm, as do contemporaries' recollections159?and the pasto
though enacted on a sunlit terrace, the struggles depicted ral midground of Les charmes de la vie.
evoke the same specter of artistic incapacity that haunts the In some respects so different from the architecture that
gloomy studio of La peinture. With an indirectness that is frames it, Les charmes s parkscape is, like its colonnaded ter
typical of his fetes galantes, Watteau seems to use the figure of race, a human construct. Well ordered, hospitable, and pre
the tuning musician to vent his own performance anxiety: his ternaturally aglow, it seems hypothetical rather than actual,
fears of an inability to meet the expectations of the increas wishfulness given organic form. Even the most "naturalistic"
ingly erudite and sophisticated company he kept. of Watteau's fetes galantes (for instance, La perspective, which
Watteau's tendencies toward self-doubt and self-depreca records an actual place) feature landscapes that, by virtue of
tion were noted by his intimates. Edme Gersaint recalled that being artful renderings of artistically designed outdoor
rather than being buoyed by the academic recognition and spaces, are at least twice removed from nature in its "natural"
wider repute that came his way in the later 1710s, Watteau, far state (and even further removed if the landscape gardener
from self-confident ("loin de se croire de merke"), became had based his designs on paintings, as was often the case160).
ever more dissatisfied with his work; both Gersaint and fellow The scenery in Les charmes de la vie's midground, however, is
connoisseur and dealer Pierre-Jean Mariette lamented the contrived to a degree that suggests intentional unreality on
habitual "disgust" with his own production that prompted Watteau's part; in addition to resembling a theatrical back
Watteau's unnecessary and at times destructive reworkings.153 drop, its landscape?distinctly different in paint handling
In a society that so highly valued nonchalance, Watteau's from the columns and terrace that frame it?has the look of
discontent with his work and the zeal made manifest by his a picture within the picture, an artful representation rather
worked-over paint surfaces probably were as disconcerting to than a slice of the great outdoors. More particularly, its gentle
his supporters as his pictures' minor missteps. As noted, artful contours, hazy light, and squat buildings recall the Venetian
imperfection was consciously sought out by many eighteenth landscapes Watteau admired, drew, and drew on in this pe
century aesthetes, and "gentlemen" were practiced in the riod.
presentation of perceived flaws as the products of calculated Perhaps, as Posner speculates, Watteau meant the park
offhandedness.
scape to connote "the bright joy of harmony found," and thus
The visible reworkings of Watteau's fetes, moreover, betray to act as "a foil for the action in the foreground"?by which
a drudgery that is conceptually at odds with their evocations Posner seems to mean that the social consonance implied by
of aristocratic leisure and lissome ease. Botched passages in the middle ground's clustered figures and the luminous pros
Les charmes de la vie, which put John Ingamells in mind of the pect beyond predict a happy end to the theorboist's "weari
long-acknowledged "gap between idea and execution" in some" tuning.161 Alternatively or additionally?and less anec
Watteau's oeuvre, also inspired his remark that it is "almost as dotally?the enframed and chimerical parkland conjures up
if Watteau himself were the unsuccessful instrumentalist"154 the eighteenth-century aesthete's dream: nature's perfection
of that picture?that is, someone who overreaches, and does by art's intervention.
so in full view, artful indifference be damned. Fantastic as it is, the picture within Watteau's picture re
Plax has written of the theorboist's swollen red hands as flects a contemporary reality of sorts: the kind of manipulated
signs of his almost crippling desire.155 The erotic edge she "nature" with which Parisian elites (following the lead of
imputes to his avid fingers is indeed plausible (especially in Louis XIV and the due d'Orleans) surrounded themselves, in
light of the erotic implications of the musette manipulation both the living form of parks and gardens and in two-dimen
in Les fetes venitiennes). If, however, one reads the tuning sional renderings produced by pastoral painters, draftsmen,
musician as a surrogate for the painter, the keen longing he and printmakers.162 Caylus's characterization of the Luxem
enacts not only bespeaks the fictive theorboist's social and/or bourg Gardens as "untamed [brut\" by eighteenth-century
amorous aspirations but also reflects Watteau's professional standards reminds us of the degree to which nature in elite
yearnings.156 Remarking the "ardor" with which his friend spaces was, as he remarked, "groomed [peigne]"163 and indi
toiled, Jean de Juilenne mused that Watteau wanted nothing cates the degree of stylization to which Watteau's audience
so much as to improve himself ("ne desirait rien tant que de was accustomed.
se perfectionner").157 Even in his maturity, the painter Thus connoting an enshrined ideal, the idyllic midground
pushed himself hard, working toward an ideal he sometimes of Les charmes might be seen to suggest the conceptual abso
feared beyond his grasp; Caylus describes Watteau's fixation lute toward which the bumbling artist strains, much as the
on "grandes idees" beside which his actual production framed picture within La peinture suggests its protagonist's
paled.158 aspiration. On the other hand, Les charmes's hazy vista, like
Although the exalted notions against which he measured the framed picture in La peinture, is, arguably, an artifice
his own oeuvre went unrecorded, it seems likely that the based on an artifice, and as such might be viewed as a
conceptual ideal that teased Watteau in these years was, as the vaporous sham that makes a monkey of the artist who chases
abbe de La Marre later assumed, the calibrated equipoise of after it. Les charmes (and its immediate antecedents) focuses,
naturalism and artfulness. It seems likely, too, that the broad after all, on the protracted discomfiture of he who would
outlines of any such endeavor were informed by Watteau's attempt perfection.
profound engagement with Venetian pictures in which nat It may be that Les charmes de la vie was conceived as?or
ural places and entities have been groomed with an eye to turned into?a cautionary tale of sorts. In his efforts to in
ideal beauty. The more than one hundred extant drawings gratiate himself with profoundly unappreciative elites, that
after Venetian masters he made attest to Watteau's enthusi painting's struggling artist turns his back on both the un
tamed nature that servant and chewing dog embody and the Pets: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hop
kins University Press, 2002), 125-30.
bei ideal evoked by the gauzy landscape. Like the monkey
14. It is unclear whether the black servants that appear in portraits of the
artist of La peinture, the theorboist of Les charmes de la vie late seventeenth century (for example, Figs. 5, 15) make reference to
perches at a crossroads of Nature and Culture. Like the actual people or constitute fanciful additions intended to aggrandize
white sitters and add chic of the sort evoked in fashion plates (Fig. 6).
Watteau described by contemporaries, the central figure of
15. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 146. In the seventeenth and eighteenth
each picture appears stymied by the competing demands of centuries, the word negre?which connoted servitude as well as skin
his nature, his concept, and his audience. color?was the catchall term for servants of color, including those of
Arabic and Indian extraction. The more particular term for a young
black servant was negrillon, though many writers call such boys petits
negres. In the later eighteenth century, noir?which denoted skin color
rather than slave status?came into more common usage. See Sylvie
Judy Sund teaches and writes about European and American art of Chalaye, Du noir au negre: L 'image du Noir au theatre (1550-1960)
(Paris: Harmattan, 1998), 69-70; and Sue Peabody, "There Are No
the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. This essay reflects
Slaves in France": The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien
her longtime interest in exoticism [Department of Art, Queens College, Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12.
City University of New York, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, 16. See Michel Feher, "Libertinisms," in The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and
N Y. 11367, judysund@mac. com]. Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Zone Books,
1997), 10-47; and Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers ofPre-Rev
olutionary France (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 90.
17. See H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renais
Notes sance (London: Warburg Institute, 1952); Anne-Marie Lecoq, "Le
singe de la nature," in La peinture dans la peinture, exh. cat. (Dijon:
I am deeply indebted to Colin Bailey and Marjorie Munsterberg for their Musee des Beaux-Arts, 1983); Ptolemy Tompkins, The Monkey in Art
comments on an early draft of this essay, and to Scott Gilbert for his generous (New York: Scala, 1994); and Bernard Marret, Portraits de Vartiste en
support of all my work. I am also grateful to have had the opportunity to singe: Les singeries dans la peinture (Paris: Somogy, 2001).
present a short version as a lecture at Duke University's Department of Art,
18. The decorations for Marly were commissioned by Louis XIV about
Art History, and Visual Studies. Two anonymous readers for The Art Bulletin
1709, and likely defaced or destroyed in the Revolution. The stripped
also made suggestions that helped reshape this material. I wish to dedicate chateau was demolished in 1806; Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Deco
this foray into the eighteenth century to the memories of Donald Posner and
Robert Rosenblum. ration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995), 140; and Marret, Portraits de Vartiste en
Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
singe, 48. A less finished but more elaborate variant on Audran's draw
1. John Ingamells, in Ingamells and Herbert Lank, "The Cleaning of ing is attributed to Watteau, who apparently collaborated on the
Watteau's 'Les Charmes de la Vie,' " Burlington Magazine 125, no. 969 project; see Marianne Roland Michel, Watteau: An Artist of the Eigh
(1983): 733-39, at 733. teenth Century (London: Trefoil Books, 1984), 26.
2. Ibid., 733. 19. Teniers's Monkey Painter (Fig. 8) and Monkey Sculptor (Museo del
Prado, Madrid) are among his many paintings in which monkeys in
3. Watteau did not date his paintings. Most scholars agree that Le prelude
human dress parody aspects of contemporary life. Of Watteau's extant
au concert predates Les charmes de la vie; the chronological position of
works, La sculpture (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Orleans) comes closest to
Pour nous prouvons que cette belle is debated. I believe it was made first,
Teniers's monkey paintings; see Mary Vidal, Watteau's Painted Conversa
and I operate under that assumption here.
tions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 152-53.
4. Donald Posner makes a similar argument for Watteau's fetes galantes as
20. While Vidal (ibid.) sees La peinture's protagonist as merely "leisured,
a group, noting that as "the implications of themes and motifs be
meditative," Mary Sheriff finds him "consumptive" ("Reflecting on
came clearer to Watteau . . . whole compositions were repeated, or
Chardin," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29, no. 1
rather, recast and reorchestrated, deepened in content by the intro
[1988]: 19-45, at 37), seconding Dora Panofsky, who?noting the
duction of ancillary motifs and by variations on themes"; Posner, An
ape's "emaciated body" and "feverishly brilliant eye"?is reminded of
toine Watteau (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1984), 153.
"the consumptive, solitary, self-tormenting Watteau himself (Panof
5. The ambiguity of Watteau's intent was such that his friend and biog sky, "Gilles or Pierrot? Iconographic Notes on Watteau," Gazette des
rapher the comte de Caylus declared that his paintings had no point Beaux-Arts 39 [1952]: 318-40, at 333-34).
("ses compositions n'ont aucun objet"); Caylus, "La vie d'Antoine
21. Claude Gillot specialized in scenes drawn from the Comedie Itali
Watteau," 1748, reprinted in Pierre Rosenberg, ed., Vies anciennes de enne. Watteau worked and lived with him from 1706 to 1708 and
Watteau (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 80.
seems to have produced his first theatrical paintings under Gillot's
6. Domna C. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art (New York: Columbia Univer tutelage.
sity Press, 1980).
22. Panofsky, "Gilles or Pierrot?" 334.
7. A. P. Mirimonde's reading of Les charmes de la vie is widely reiterated
23. According to Matias Dias Padron and Mercedes Royo-Villanova, Te
in the literature; Mirimonde, "Les sujets musicaux chez Antoine
niers's Monkey Painter is likewise self-referential; Dias Padron and
Watteau," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 58 (1961): 249-88, esp. 263-66.
Royo-Villanova, entry to El mono pintor, in David Teniers, Jan Breughel y
8. See ibid., 260, 264; Posner, Antoine Watteau, 148-51; and Oliver T. los Gabinetes de Pinturas, exh. cat. (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1992),
Banks, Watteau and the North: Studies in Dutch and Flemish Baroque Influ 108. Teniers draws on the monkey-painter analogy in Family Concert on
ence on French Rococo Painting (New York: Garland, 1977), chap. 5. a Terrace (Fig. 4), in which the monkey on the balustrade constitutes a
9. Sara Wages traces the history of the buitenpartij in "Remarks on Love, winking reference to Teniers's painterly capacity for imitation; Mar
Woman and the Garden in Netherlandish Art: A Study on the Iconol gret Klinge, entry to Familieconcert op net terras, in David Teniers de
ogy of the Garden," in Rembrandt, Rubens and the Art of Their Time: Re Jonge: Schilderijen, Tekeningen, exh. cat. (Antwerp: Koninklijk voor
cent Perspectives, ed. Roland Fleischer and Susan C. Scott (University Schonekunsten, 1991), 128.
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 177-222. 24. For Watteau's work as a copyist, see Banks, Watteau and the North,
10. For a panhistorical examination of human subjugations of plants, ani chap. 4. After working in Gillot's studio, Watteau moved to Audran's;
mals, and fellow humans as potent displays of power, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Audran's uncle and/or brother probably arranged Watteau's enroll
Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale Univer ment in the school of the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts. Watteau
sity Press, 1984). Keith Thomas undertakes similar analyses in Man joined the academy in 1712 and became a full member in 1717.
and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Lon 25. Abbe de La Marre, "L'Art et la Nature reunis par Watteau," reprinted
don: Allen Lane, 1983). in Rosenberg, Vies anciennes de Watteau, 24-25: "Que votre interet vous
11. Jean de La Bruyere, quoted in Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art, 178: rassemble, / Vous etes faits pour etre ensemble. / Je veux vous unir ?
"Combien d'art pour rentrer dans la nature!" jamais, / Venez chez moi faire la paix."
12. See Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 43-44, 55; and Pierre-Andre La 26. Ibid.: "L'Art gagna des beautes / La Nature en fut plus parfaite."
blaude, "The Taming of the Natural World," in The Gardens of Ver 27. My sense of these pictures' overarching theme was confirmed by read
sailles (Paris: Scala, 1995), 35-80. ing Julie-Anne Plax, "The Fete Galante and the Cult of Honnetete," in
13. See Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 110-17; Tuan, Dominance and Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France (New York:
Affection, 107-8; and Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves & Pampered Cambridge University Press, 2000), 108-53.
28. Banks, Watteau and the North, 182, notes the "erotic significance" of logically determined; French aristocrats claimed Germanic origins
instrument tuning in Dutch pictures and the prevalence of musical that made them "naturally" superior to those of Gallo-Roman descent;
instruments in vanitas still lifes, where they represent "the sin of lust" Cohen, The French Encounter, 96-97.
and "a lazy or sinful life" (179-80). 47. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 30, noting the influence of landscape
29. Indeed, Posner, Antoine Watteau, 160, bluntly asserts that the lutenist's painting on landscape gardeners, points out that Le Notre, who once
"inadequacy as a musician spells his failure as a lover." aspired to paint, "composed his gardens as a painter might compose a
30. See, for example, Melchior de Marmot, Maximes pour vivre heureuse picture."
ment dans le monde et pour former I'honnete homme (Paris: Charles de 48. De Piles and La Fosse were Rubenists who vaunted the paint handling
Scery, 1662), who advises only limited and calculated displays of emo and colorism that Rubens admired in the work of his Venetian ante
tion (166). cedents. De Piles was the leading intellectual light of Crozat's coterie
31. Vidal, Watteau's Painted Conversations, 218 n. 8. The lute was not only until his death in 1709; his ideas continued to hold sway there when
difficult to play (Florence Getreau, "Watteau and Music," in Watteau, Watteau was introduced to Crozat and his circle by La Fosse. See Mar
1684-1721, by Margaret Grasselli and Pierre Rosenberg, exh. cat. garet Stuffmann, "Les tableaux de la collection de Pierre Crozat," Ga
[Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1984], 527-45, at 542) zette des Beaux-Arts 72 (July-September 1968): 11-144, at 42-43; and
but also hard to tune (Mirimonde, "Les sujets musicaux," 264). Robert C. Cafritz, "Rococo Restoration of the Venetian Landscape
and Watteau's Creation of the Fete Galante," in Places of Delight: The
32. Le Chavalier de Mere [Antoine Gombaud], Oeuvres computes, 3 vols. Pastoral Landscape, by Cafritz et al., exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Phil
(Paris: Fernand Roche, 1930), vol. 2, 32, 34.
lips Collection / NGA, 1988), 149-81, at 150, 176 n. 14.
33. Getreau ("Watteau and Music," 542) writes that by 1720 the lute was 49. Pierre-Jean Mariette later recalled that he, Watteau, and Caylus soon
virtually abandoned by Parisian musicians in favor of the theorbo, a set about copying Crozat's new holdings, their efforts doubtless en
larger, longer-necked stringed instrument that was almost equally dif couraged by de Piles's assertion that imitation of the Venetians eluci
ficult to play. dated the pastoral's expressive potential; Cafritz, "Rococo Restora
34. Banks, Watteau and the North; Posner, Antoine Watteau; and Martin Ei tion," 155, 177 n. 31; and Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes
delberg (Watteau et la fete galante, exh. cat. [Valenciennes: Musee des (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), 202-5, 240-41.
Beaux-Arts, 2004]) all illustrate such scenes. Posner, 248, specifically
50. Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau, 1684-1721, 221.
compares Le prelude au concert and Les charmes de la vie to Teniers's
Family Concert on a Terrace.
51. Cafritz, "Rococo Restoration," 150.
35. Pierre Crozat, the younger son of a Toulouse banker, was appointed 52. Ibid., 163; Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau, 1684-1721, 323; and Pos
ner, Antoine Watteau, 154.
tr'esorier de France in 1704 and went on to become the greatest private
collector in eighteenth-century France. He hosted weekly gatherings 53. See Ingamells, "The Cleaning of Watteau's 'Les Charmes,' " 734.
of artists and connoisseurs at his opulent Parisian town house, which
54. Ibid., 734. A diagram of Les charmes in its early stages lacks both the
Watteau began to frequent about 1712-13. Watteau also lived in
large dog and the boy with wine tub.
Crozat's home at some point(s).
55. Posner, Antoine Watteau, 157.
36. Andre Le Notre, the landscape architect of Vaux-le-Vicomte (1656
61) and Versailles (1662-90), designed the gardens at Montmorency 56. Watteau's reversal of Rubens's dog reflects its print source?almost
for its first owner, Charles Le Brun, a guiding force of the Academie certainly Audran's engraving of Marie's coronation; Philip Hendy,
Royale des Beaux-Arts and premier peintre to Louis XIV. "Watteau and Rubens," Burlington Magazine 49, no. 282 (September
1926): 137-38.
37. Following Mirimonde, "Les sujets musicaux," 264-65, some scholars
look for the violoncello player among the figures at left, though that 57. See Paul H. D. Kaplan, "Titian's 'Laura Dianti' and the Origins of the
instrument's owner perhaps stands outside the frame. Like the ivory Black Page in Portraiture," pts. 1 and 2, Antichita Viva 21, no. 1
handled knives of many Dutch still lifes, the violoncello may be of (1982): 11-18; 21, no. 4 (1982): 10-18.
fered to the viewer in a spirit of invitation; Banks, Watteau and the 58. Helmut B?rsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721 (Cologne: Kone
North, 180, characterizes the foreground instruments of several seven mann, 2000), 104; Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau, 1684-1721, 154;
teenth-century Dutch pictures as constituting "an implicit suggestion" Alan Wintermute, entry to Pleasures of the Dance, in The Age of Watteau,
that the viewer "join the musicale." Chardin and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, by Colin
38. Jan Baptist Bedaux, "Discipline for Innocence: Metaphors for Educa Bailey et al., exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 128.
tion in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting," in The Reality of Symbols: Elsewhere, Wintermute links Watteau's Three Studies of a Black Youth
Studies in the Iconology of Netherlandish Art 1400-1800 (Rotterdam: Gary (Fig. 11) to a similar work by Veronese that was in Crozat's collection;
Schwartz Publishers, 1990), 109-69, at 119. Wintermute, Watteau and His World: French Drawings from 1700 to 1750
39. Katlijne Van der Stighelen, entry no. 45, in Pride and foy: Children's (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999), 33. Watteau probably knew
Portraits in the Netherlands, 1500-1700, ed. Jan Baptist Bedaux and Veronese's Marriage at Cana from the copy that hung in Crozat's town
Rudi Ekkart, exh. cat. (Haarlem: Frans Halsmuseum, 2000), 190. See house (Stuffmann, "Les tableaux de Crozat," cat. no. 180); the origi
also Vidal, Watteau's Painted Conversations, 113.
nal, now in the Musee du Louvre, did not arrive in France until 1798.
40. Bedaux, "Discipline for Innocence," 112. 59. This figure is reversed in Plaisirs du bal, and the helmet he holds re
placed by a serving tray.
41. Ibid., 113, 119.
60. Precedents in Rubens's work, and the similarity of that artist's oil
42. See, for instance, L'enchanteur, ca. 1712-14 (Musee des Beaux-Arts,
sketch of black heads to studies by Watteau (Fig. 11), are noted by
Troyes), whose guitarist "wishes to impose himself on a partner who Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau, 1684-1721, 154; and Wintermute,
seems neither to see nor hear him"; Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau, Watteau and His World, 33, though Wintermute thinks Watteau was
1684-1721, 283; and La lecon d'amour, ca. 1716-17 (Nationalmuseum,
"more certainly" thinking of Veronese when he made his drawings.
Stockholm).
61. Martin Eidelberg, Watteau et la fete galante, 204-5, discusses La fete sei
43. Mirimonde, "Les sujets musicaux," 265, identifies this man as the vio gneuriale as an antecedent to Watteau's fetes galantes. See also Banks,
loncello player, and the theorboist's rival. Watteau and the North, 69, 171.
44. Stephen Duffy and Jo Hedley (The Wallace Collection's Pictures: A Com 62. In his painters' guide, Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst
plete Catalogue [London: Unicorn Press / Lindsay Fine Art, 2004], (Rotterdam, 1678), Samuel van Hoogstraten recommends the addi
471) assert that the theorbo of Le prelude au concert becomes, in Les
tion of an exotic animal or Moor to lend "lustre" to a scene; see Julie
charmes, a chitarrone, but the terms "theorbo" and "chitarrone" appar
Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New
ently were interchangeable; see A. Banchieri, Conclusioni nel suono
Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 210; and Marysa Otte, " 'Somtijts
dell'organo (Bologna, 1609), 69.
een Moor': De neger als bijfiguur op Nederlandse portretten in de
45. From its inception, the Great Chain of Being ran the gamut from in zeventiende en achttiende eeuw," Kunstlicht 8, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 6-10.
animate objects to animals, humans, and gods; see William B. Cohen,
63. Despite its portraitlike specificity, I characterize Rigaud's Black Youth
The French Encounter with Africans: White Responses to Blacks, 1530-1880
(Fig. 16) as "decorative" on the basis of its description by Ariane
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 86-99. Though the
James, Visages du Grand Siecle, exh. cat. (Toulouse: Somogy, 1997),
Great Chain traditionally had been characterized as an unbroken con
244. (Decorative pieces, being animated but not anecdotal, may be
tinuum, Thomas DiPiero notes that the difference between white and
seen to hover between genre and still life.) Rigaud's painting is
nonwhite peoples was considered substantive enough to constitute a
thought to have been owned by Antoine Coypel, whose own Black Boy
rupture; DiPiero, "Missing Links: Whiteness and the Color of Reason
with Fruit (Fig. 17) makes Rigaud's look soberly veristic. Rigaud's pic
in the Eighteenth Century," Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
ture, later acquired by Madame du Barry, came to be considered a
40, no. 2 (1999): 155-74.
portrait of her famed slave Zamor; Jean Cailleux, "The Adventures of
46. The phrase "noblesse de race" referenced a belief that class was bio a Black Boy in Search of a Master," L 'art du dix-huitieme siecle, supple
ment to Burlington Magazine 103, no. 700, suppl. no. 8 (July 1961): wife) and, later, by Louis XV's wife, Marie Leczinska. This "scandal" is
i-v. rehearsed by several modern authors, who detail the story in various
64. B?rsch-Supan, Antoine Watteau, 1684-1721, 87. ways; most seem to rely on Jules Mathorez, Les etrangers en France sous
lancien regime: Histoire de la formation de la population francaise, 2 vols.
65. Denys Sutton, Antoine Watteau: "Les Charmes de la Vie" (London: Lund,
(Paris: E. Champion, 1919-21).
Humphries, 1946), 9-10. Such was the court's affection for people of color that, as Srinivas
66. Caylus recalled that Watteau dressed models in costumes from his Aravadmudan reports, "An African imposter called Aniaba, who ap
own collection to create characters deployed in fetes galantes ("La vie peared in Paris in 1688, was adopted by Louis XIV as a godson"; Ara
d'Antoine Watteau," 78-79). Citing Vleughels's appearance in Les fetes vadmudan, Tropocopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804
venitiennes (Fig. 26), where he seems "comically miscast," Plax, "The (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 38. McCloy, The Negro
Fete Galante," 127-28, speculates that Watteau enjoyed working against in France, 15-16, observes that black converts in France often had dis
type. tinguished godparents and describes Aniaba as simply the most prom
67. The parlement (high court) of Bordeaux offered that observation in inent of several putative African princes who presented themselves to
ordering the release of Africans put on sale there; quoted in Emeka Parisian society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
P. Abanime, "The Anti-Negro French Law of 1777," fournal of Negro 79. Most scholars are skeptical about those eighteenth-century accounts
History 64, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 21-29, at 21. that put the number at four to five thousand (Peabody, "No Slaves in
68. The Code Noir, issued by Louis XLV in 1665 and registered at Santo France," 4); McCloy, The Negro in France, 5, cites the sole eighteenth
century census of blacks in France, which recorded about one thou
Domingo in 1687, mandated the Catholic baptism of colonial slaves
and governed their marriage, sale, discipline, and punishment. sand in the late 1770s. The vast majority had entered via port cities,
but many moved on to Paris, where?as fashion prints (Fig. 6) and
69. The "King's Edict Concerning Negro Slaves from the Colonies," portraits (figs. 5, 15) indicate?black servants had been chic and de
drafted by the comte de Toulouse, minister of the Navy, was issued sirable since the late seventeenth century. While the early-eighteenth
jointly by France's regent, Philippe d'Orleans, and its six-year-old century presence of Africans in Paris cannot be archivally docu
king, Louis XV, on October 1, 1716. mented, life drawings of three different black models, made between
70. Robert Harms details the case of one such slave who successfully peti 1715 and 1720 by Watteau, Charles de La Fosse, and Nicolas Lancret,
tioned for freedom; Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of suggest some influx in the century's first decades (see n. 83 below).
the Slave Trade (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 6-11. Some writers cite anecdotal evidence of a rising black presence;
71. Nantes and Bordeaux were France's largest and second-largest slave Scobie, "The Black in Western Europe," 199, claims that over the
trading ports, followed by La Rochelle and Le Havre; Robert Louis course of the eighteenth century, "fifteen hundred abandoned mu
Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime
latto foundlings became a grave problem in Paris" and notes the con
Business (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 10. temporaneous establishment of a College des Africaines on Orleans's
rue Negres. By 1777, France's black population was high enough to
72. While France's colonization of the West Indies was originally under prompt what Abanime, "The Anti-Negro French Law," 21, calls "the
taken as a political and military strategy, Louis XLV's finance minister, most drastic of all the anti-Negro edicts of the period," a law that pro
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, redirected it to commercial growth. Agriculture hibited "any black or mulatto, free or slave, to enter the French king
emerged as the best route to profits, and sugarcane was the biggest dom thereafter." Nonetheless, Pierre Boulle estimates that some 765
cash crop. Because the process of refining sugar was so labor-inten blacks lived in Paris in the 1780s ("Les gens de couleur ? Paris ? la
sive, France threw itself into the slave trade, which, by the end of the veille de la Revolution," in L'image de la Revolution francaise, ed. Michel
seventeenth century, was the foundation of the islands' economies; Vovelle [Paris: Pergamon, 1989], 159); and Cissie Fairchilds asserts
ibid., 3-4. that there were "so many blacks in the households of the Parisian
73. Hans Werner Debrunner (Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe haut monde that during the Revolution they provided a whole com
[Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 1979], 69) writes that the entou pany of soldiers" (Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants & Their Masters
rage of Don Matheo Lopez of Arda, received by Louis XLV in 1670, in Old Regime France [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
included four personal slaves; Shelby T. McCloy (The Negro in France 1984], 158).
[Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961], 13) notes that ten 80. Abanime, "The Anti-Negro French Law," 22. A second edict, issued in
black slaves accompanied the horses and elephants sent to Louis XLV 1737, sought to slow the growth of France's slave population by limit
by the king of Ethiopia. ing to three years the sojourns of black servants brought or sent to
74. McCloy, The Negro in France, 15, reports that Marie Therese's negrillon France by colonials.
was a gift from a French aristocrat who had traveled to Africa, and 81. Peabody, "No Slaves in France," 22. Though Peabody suggests that the
that the comte de Pontchartrain received a black boy from an African comte de Toulouse, who drafted the Edict of 1716, did not press for
prince. its registration in the capital because "he did not think that the pres
75. This sentiment is attributed to Louis XLV in a letter his minister of ence of slaves in the landlocked region around Paris would ever
the Navy, the comte de Pontchartrain, wrote to a slave from Marti amount to much," Harms, The Diligent, 24-28, argues that the edict
nique who complained about her treatment in France (Abanime, was actively blocked by a Jansenist faction within the Parisian parle
ment.
"The Anti-Negro French Law," 22). On another occasion, Pontchar
train wrote that the liberty of two black stowaways from the Caribbean 82. Peabody, "No Slaves in France, " 17.
was "acquired by the laws of the kingdom as soon as they touched the
soil" of France (quoted in Harms, The Diligent, 9). 83. Even before the regent's edict was issued, black models clearly were
available in Paris; Watteau's mentor, Charles de La Fosse, made life
76. Peabody, "No Slaves in France, " 6. drawings of one he cast as the black magus of his Adoration of the
77. Francoise-Marie de Bourbon and Louise-Francoise de Bourbon (Fig. Magi, 1715 (Louvre). La Fosse's drawings (British Museum, Lon
15) were Louis XLV's natural daughters by Madame de Montespan. In don)?long attributed to Watteau?probably were familiar to the
1692 Francoise-Marie (at left) would marry her cousin Philippe younger artist and may have inspired his own drawings after a differ
d'Orleans, the future regent of France. Although Vignon's inclusion ent African (Fig. 11); see Jean-Pierre Cuzin, "Deux dessins du British
of a caricatured negre?whom Debrunner, Presence and Prestige, 93, Museum: Watteau, ou plutot La Fosse," Revue du Louvre 31, no. 1
bluntly labels "an ugly African lad between two all-too-white ladies"? (1981): 19-21; and Clementine Gustin-Gomez, Charles de la Fosse,
does not prove that either woman owned a slave, that figure's lack of 1636-1716: Le maitre des modernes (Dijon: Editions Faton, 2006), vol. 2,
verisimilitude does not disprove his existence, since the women who 198-99. Nicolas Lancret, in turn, surely had Watteau's studies in
flank him look no more "real" than he does. mind when he produced his own life drawings of yet another black
model about 1720 (Art Institute of Chicago); see Mary Tavener
78. Throughout Louis XLV's reign, gossip circulated about what Roi Ot
Holmes, Nicolas Lancret, 1690-1743, exh. cat. (New York: Harry N.
tley calls "royal philandering with negroes" (No Green Pastures [New
Abrams / Frick Collection, 1999), 134, no. 33; and Wintermute,
York: Scribner's, 1951], quoted in Edward Scobie, "The Black in West
Watteau and His World, 210-11, no. 60.
ern Europe," in African Presence in Early Europe, ed. Ivan van Sertima
[New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1985], 200). The most persistent 84. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 158.
tale (later recorded by the comte de Saint-Simon and by Jules 85. Cohen, The French Encounter, 88, quotes Voltaire's assertion that Afri
Michelet in his Histoire de France au dix-septieme siecle [Paris, I860]) re cans had "only a few more ideas than animals" and that philosopher
volved around a biracial woman purported to be the offspring of joking claim that "it is a serious question among them whether they
Louis XLV and a woman of color. Born in 1656, Louise Marie Theresa are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from
(popularly known as the "Mooress") was, as McCloy notes, "sometimes them."
referred to as a Negress," although her ethnicity is unclear (The Negro
in France, 14). From 1695 until her death in 1732, she resided in a 86. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 132-33.
convent in Moret and received a substantial royal pension. She was 87. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial" Self
visited by Madame de Maintenon (Louis XLV's second, morganatic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 11. See also Fairchilds,
ANTOINE WATTEAU AND LES CHARMES DE LA VIE gl
Domestic Enemies, 158. This popular attitude may be linked to those of Ian, "Gersaint's Shopsign and the World of Art Dealing in Eighteenth
eighteenth-century naturalists and philosophes who considered the link Century Paris," Art Bulletin 78 (September 1996): 439-53.
age of blacks and monkeys "self-evident," given their similarities of 107. In discussing Coypel's picture, Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 146, com
color and origin (Cohen, The French Encounter, 87). pares "the pampered lapdog and the equally pampered blackamoor."
88. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 146, 148, 159. Thomas, Man and the Natu 108. See Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 112; and n. 88 above.
ral World, 112, draws a distinction between "working dogs" and those
allowed inside, remarking that "officers who excluded dogs from the 109. See Hall, Things of Darkness, 211-53; and Hochstrasser, Still Life and
court of Henry VIII made an exception for the ladies' spaniels." Trade, 204-27. Many of the black servants discussed by Hochstrasser
are shown in proximity to heaped fruits that connote abundance,
89. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 142, cites an advertisement for "silver and, if exotic, colonial abundance. Antoine Crozat, the older brother
padlocks for Blacks or Dogs, collars, etc." in the London Advertiser of
of Watteau's benefactor Pierre and the head of his family in the early
1756. Such hardware often bore the slave owner's name, monogram,
or coat of arms. eighteenth century, owed much of his vast wealth to colonial com
merce. "A prime mover in the Indies Company," Antoine Crozat was
90. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies, 159. In the same vein, Gaston Martin de "granted a personal monopoly over trade with the Louisiana colony"
scribes how slavery metamorphosed into a sort of "doglike loyalty to in 1712; Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century
the master's household [domesticity ? la fidelity animate]"; Martin, Nantes Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 39.
au Xllle siecle: L'ere des negriers (1714-1774), d'apres documents inedits Nicholas Mirzoeff notes the colonial connections of Claude Glucq
(Paris: Felix Alcan, 1931), 162. (1674-1742), the first owner of Les charmes de la vie, whose wealth de
91. Peabody, "No Slaves in France," 158 n. 3. rived from textiles. Erroneously characterizing the Edict of 1716 as
liberating black slaves in France, Mirzoeff suggests the servant of Les
92. The "portrait" of Bailly's title refers to the miniature the boy holds,
charmes is a "recently freed African" who might "stand as a rebuke to
not to the boy himself; Sarah D. Benson et al., eds., A Handbook of the
the slave economy" and may have "given pause to Glucq and his fam
Collection (Ithaca, N.Y.: Herbert F.Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell
ily." Although I find these suppositions doubtful, I agree with Mir
University; New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1998), 118. For broader
zoeff s more plausible interpretation of Les charmes 's negrillon as "an
discussion of subjugated Africans' appearances in Dutch portraits and unashamed evocation of colonial wealth." Mirzoeff, "The Flickers of
in the subgenre he calls "pronkstilleven with black slave," see Charles
Seduction: The Ambivalent and Surprising Painting of Watteau," in
Ford, "People as Property," Oxford Art fournal25 (2002): 3-16; see also
Antoine Watteau: Perspective on the Artist and the Culture of His Time, ed.
Timothy Brook, "Journeys," in Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century
Mary Sheriff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 130.
and the Dawn of the Global World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008),
185-216. Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 210, notes that the people 110. Watteau's familiarity with Audran's drawing is made clear by his own
of color who appear in such works rarely were owned by those por variant (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm), which takes up the same vi
trayed; often they were "recycled" from one picture to another. gnettes. In his version's lowest register, Watteau, like Audran, presents
a monkey before a flat-bottomed wine cooler, though Watteau's mon
93. For further discussion of this print, see David Dabydeen, Hogarth's
key assumes a more complex posture, with head in profile and back
Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Kingston-upon
and hips seen from the rear.
Thames: Dangaroo Press, 1985), 128-29; and Lars Tharp, Hogarth's
China: Hogarth's Paintings and Eighteenth-Century Ceramics (London: 111. Keith Moxey, "Master E.S. and the Folly of Love," Simiolus 11 (1980):
Merrell Holberton, 1997), 93. 125-48, at 138. Wages, "Remarks on Love," 179, suggests the Song of
Solomon inspired the euphemistic equation of wine drinking with
94. Touching on this aspect of the parallels drawn between black boys
sexual intercourse, and surely the two were linked in Roman baccha
and monkeys, Mary L. Bellhouse notes the ape's association with mi
nalia that celebrated the god of wine.
mesis and concludes, "Through reiteration, the conflated terms mon
key, non-European, dark skin, and mimic gradually gained ontological 112. Moxey, "Master E.S.," 139, cites lyrics from several sixteenth-century
status in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century stereotype of the colo songs; in each instance, "cool" wine is specified: "Give me the red
nial subject as failed mimic"; Bellhouse, "Candide Shoots the Monkey roses dear / I will give you the cool wine"; "Oh welcome, sweet love
Lovers: Representing Black Men in Eighteenth-Century Visual Cul . . . Now let us enjoy ourselves and go and drink the cool wine."
ture," Political Theory 34 (2006): 741-84, at 746. 113. Banks, Watteau and the North, 181.
95. Louis-Sebastien Mercier, "Petits Negres," in Tableau de Paris, 8 vols. 114. Though Teniers was a renowned cellist (ibid., 132), his self-depiction
(Amsterdam, 1782-83), vol. 6, 175-76. Mercier reported that pets as one?with singing wife and son?also draws on musical metaphor
that formerly enjoyed access to their mistresses' private quarters had to present the couple as attuned, their family life as harmonious
been banished to antechambers in favor of the negrillons whom Parisi (Klinge, David Teniers de Jonge, 126). The references to wine that
ennes allowed to sit in their laps and sip from their cups. Hogarth's bracket the couple probably suggest the sensual delights of conjugal
Taste in High Life may suggest its monkey's displacement by the boy of love, while the boy between them connotes its product.
color, who is elevated, chin-chucked, and marked (by his costume) as
showier and more exotic. 115. Lancret, a Watteau imitator, perhaps had Les charmes de la vie in mind
when he included a young black servant with bottles in his Fete cham
96. Ben Jonson, quoted in Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of petre (Fig. 22); the servant of that picture, down on one knee, holds a
Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer glass in the direction of a party of white adults who do not acknowl
sity Press, 1995), 248.
edge his presence. In Lancret's Luncheon Party in the Park (1735, Mu
97. Note the easy familiarity with which Louise-Francoise de Bourbon seum of Fine Arts, Boston), white servants hold trays of fruit as their
drapes her hand over the slave's shoulder (Fig. 15). See Mercier, "Pe black colleague uncorks a bottle of champagne; this black steward is
tits Negres," 175. See also Roger Little, Between Totem and Taboo: Black reprised in Lancret's Ham Luncheon (1735, Musee Conde, Chantilly).
Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature (Exeter: University of Ex In Jean-Francois de Troy's Hunt Luncheon (1737, Louvre), wine is
eter Press, 2001), 32; and Hall, Things of Darkness, 241 n. 18, who poured by a turbaned black man, while the other servants, all white,
stresses the negrillons' "role in status competition" and reminds: unpack a hamper. While black wine stewards may not be the rule,
"Given that these were some of the few males over which women had they often people Rococo feast scenes.
absolute control, they provided these women with an avenue for the 116. See Cohen, The French Encounter, 20.
exercise of power."
117. See Guillerm, "Le Systeme de l'iconographie"; and Philip Stewart,
98. In addition to the print illustrated here, Alain Guillerm discusses (but
"Representations of Love in the French Eighteenth Century," Studies
does not illustrate) Bernard Picard's early-eighteenth-century treat in Iconology 4 (1978): 125-48.
ment of an "almost identical scene," in "Le Systeme de l'iconographie
galante," Dix-Huitieme Siecle 12 (1980): 177-94, at 189-90. 118. Robert Isherwood observes that obscene gesticulation and sexual in
nuendo figured prominently in almost every production of the Opera
99. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 142.
Comique (the popular alternative theatrical form to the Opera that
100. Ibid., 146. emerged in Paris in 1715) and notes that equivocal language and
101. Posner, Antoine Watteau, 151. double entendre, the stock-in-trade of such productions, were readily
102. Plax, "The Fete Galante" 1, 127. understood by their broad-ranging audiences; Isherwood, Farce and
Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York: Ox
103. Sutton, Antoine Watteau, 6. ford University Press, 1986), 67-68.
104. Plax, "The Fete Galante" 137. 119. Stewart, "Representations of Love," 139, 125, 126.
105. See Ronald Forsyth Millen and Robert Erich Wolf, Heroic Deeds and 120. See, for example, La marmote, 1714-15 (Hermitage Museum, St. Pe
Mystic Figures: A New Reading of Rubens' "Life of Maria de' Medici" tersburg), and L'indiscret (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotter
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 107-20. dam).
106. See Vidal, Watteau's Painted Conversations, 188-91; and Andrew McClel 121. Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau, 1684-1721, 163; see, for instance,
g2 ART BULLETIN MARCH 2009 VOLUME XCI NUMBER 1
The Toilette (Wallace Collection, London) and Morning Toilette (private 143. Bedaux, "Discipline for Innocence," 141, notes that the prevale
collection, France). bridled goats (symbols of reined lust) in Dutch boys' portraits "
122. Caylus, "La vie d'Antoine Watteau," 72. bear directly on the notion that women are by nature more mo
than men. Boys were consequently thought to need more discip
123. Charles Pinot Duclos, quoted in Karl Toth, Woman and Rococo in than girls, whom nature endowed with an innate sense of shame
France, Seen through the Life and Works of a Contemporary, Charles-Pinot
Duclos, trans. Roger Abingdon (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1931), 88. 144. Watteau's birthplace, Valenciennes, was ceded to France just six
before the artist's birth. Watteau's nationality was therefore "am
124. Grasselli and Rosenberg, Watteau, 1684-1721, 163. ous," "half French, half Flemish"; Banks, Watteau and the North, 1
125. Donald Posner, "The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard," 145. Caylus, "La vie d'Antoine Watteau," 58: "Le don que la nature a
Art Bulletin 64 (March 1982): 75-88, at 77.
146. David Wakefield, French Eighteenth-Century Painting (London:
126. Bellhouse, "Candide Shoots the Monkey Lovers," 745-46, remarks Fraser, 1984), 23; see Jean de Julienne, Figures de differentes caract
that blacks' eighteenth-century linkage to monkeys marked them as 1726, reprinted in Rosenberg, Vies anciennes de Watteau, 16.
lustful, since monkeys long symbolized luxury and licentiousness.
147. Posner, Antoine Watteau, 248.
127. Compare Vignon's black boy (Fig. 15), whose wild-eyed expression?
startlingly at odds with the propriety of his clothing and gesture? 148. Teniers's profession is symbolically referenced by the preenin
suggests irrepressible animality. key above him; Klinge, David Teniers deJonge, 128 (see n. 23 abo
128. Banks, in fact, suggests (Watteau and the North, 222) that the "frantic 149. For discussion of the musette player as a self-portrait, see Posn
pursuit" of Les charmes's larger dog may allude to "erotic pursuits toine Watteau, 240, 243; Crow, Painters and Public Life, 63; and Wi
which are taking place in various guises throughout the picture." mute's catalog entry to Venetian Pleasures, in Bailey et al., The A
Watteau, 138.
129. People of color were seen by many Jews and Christians as actively ac
cursed, based on an interpretative reading of Genesis 9:22-25, in 150. Colin Thompson and Hugh Brigstocke, National Gallery of Scotl
which Noah berates his son Ham and curses Ham's son, condemning Shorter Catalogue (Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 1978
no. 439.
him to slavery. In the Middle Ages, serfdom was associated with the
"Hamite curse," and by the sixteenth century, blackness as well as ser 151. Wintermute (entry to Venetian Pleasures, in Bailey et al., The Age of
vitude were seen as its marks. Adam Lively writes that "the myth of Watteau, 138) speculates that Watteau played Vleughels's likeness
the Hamite curse" illustrates "the importance of transgression for the against his own to create some "sophisticated private joke, whose ex
association of blackness with sexuality"; Lively, Masks: Blackness, Race act meaning is now lost, to be shared by the men and their circle." A
& the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 20-23. similar sort of joke probably informed Vleughels's casting as the com
130. Cohen, The French Encounter, 19. manding seigneur of Les charmes de la vie.
131. Dahis, the black slave described by Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon 152. As Caylus later remarked, Watteau defied his background by adjoin
fils in La Sopha (1742), is "ignorant of gallantry," and his mistress is ing excessive zeal ("exces d'application") to the gift with which na
said to "compensate herself with Dahis "for the reserve she was ture endowed him ("don que la nature a fait") ("La vie d'Antoine,
forced into by her husband." Later in the century, the fictional negre Watteau," 56, 58).
of Andrea de Nerciat's Le diable au corps (1789) is described as "half 153. E.-F. Gersaint, Catalogue raisonne des diverses curiosites du Cabinet de Feu
monkey" and possessed of a phallus the color and hardness of iron. Quentin de Lorangere, 1744, reprinted in Rosenberg, Vies anciennes de
Though the African paramour emerged as a literary type some years Watteau, 36; and Pierre-Jean Mariette, annotations to his copy of Pelle
after Watteau's death, he was the descendant of the amorous "Moor" grino Orlandi, Abecedario pittorico, reprinted in ibid.
of seventeenth-century farce. Chalaye, Du noir au negre, 53, cites sev
154. Ingamells, "The Cleaning of Watteau's 'Les Charmes,' " 733.
eral speeches from seventeenth-century courtly productions that cele
brate the Moor's capacity and proclivity for lovemaking (45-54). See 155. Plax, "The Fete Galante," 135, believes the "engorged, red hands of
also Paul Lacroix, Ballets et mascarades de cour de Henri TV ? Louis XIII, 6 many of Watteau's male figures" may "signify displaced erotic desire"
vols. (Paris: J. Gay et Fils, 1868-70). and suggest that their owners' "desire has made it impossible for
them to pursue the sort of controlled amorous ritual implied by the
132. "Aux petits sacs quelquefois se trouvent les bonnes epices"; for the
full text, see Lacroix, Ballets et mascarades, vol. 4, 95. playing of a stringed instrument."
156. Having previously noted the onanistic aspect of the theorboist's rela
133. Chalaye, Du noir au negre, 53.
tion to his instrument, I would here speculate that Watteau hints that
134. Pierre Louis Ducharte writes that while the earliest Harlequins wore the tuner's allied efforts to make art and to connect with the paint
motley, the color patches of Harlequin's costume became diamond ing's elite group are as solitary and fruitless as masturbation.
shaped and contiguous in the seventeenth century; Ducharte, The Ital
157. Jean de Julienne, Figures de differentes caracteres, 12.
ian Comedy, trans. Randolph T. Weaver (New York: Dover, 1966), 134.
158. See Caylus, "La vie d'Antoine Watteau," 67, 72.
135. The print of 1729, by Louis Jacob (Fig. 25), was based on a painting,
now lost, that Watteau made about 1705; its point of reference was 159. See Gersaint, Catalogue raisonne, 35; and Caylus, "La vie d'Antoine
Louis XLV's 1697 attempt to ban performances of the Comedie Itali Watteau," 74-75.
enne.
160. See, for instance, Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 30, on Le Notre, the
136. Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, quoted in Gates, Figures in Black,landscape
51.architect of Montmorency, which inspired Watteau's La per
Gates draws attention to the " 'negroid' profile" of the Harlequinspective. de
picted in the frontispiece of Le bon manage in Florian's 161.
1786 publica
Posner, Antoine Watteau, 160.
tion Theatre (see Gates, 52, ill. 1). Jean-Francois Marmontel, Elements
de litterature (Paris, 1787). 162. Louis XIV enjoyed his own brand of nature in the park at Versailles?
forestlike in its dimensions and alternately manicured and "wild"?as
137. Gates, Figures in Black, 51. well as in the elaborate outdoor spaces of his country retreat at Marly.
138. Ducharte, The Italian Comedy, 124, 135. Lablaude, "The Taming of the Natural World," 118, writes that at Ver
sailles's Trianon, "some 96,000 plants and two million pots buried in
139. Marmontel, quoted in Lively, Masks, 16-17.
flowerbeds made it possible during certain seasons to change the
140. See Bedaux, "Discipline for Innocence," 141. composition of the view on a daily basis"; according to Tuan, Domi
141. Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 118, cites the diary of Henrynance IV'sand Affection, 20, Marly's "bosquets, or green chambers, were re
physi
peatedly
cian for details of Louis XIII's being sexually teased and fondled bytaken down and put up to amuse the aging Louis XIV. ..."
Philippe, due
his mother, his nanny, and others at court; foumal de fean Heroard surd'Orleans (and regent from 1715 to 1723), an aficio
Venfance et la jeunesse de Louis XIII, 1601-1610, ed. E. Soulie nado
andofE. pastoral
de scenes, collected art with Crozat's help, building an
Barthelemy (Paris: Firmin Didot Freres, 1868), vol. 1, 34, 35,impressive
45. collection that resembled his adviser's in scope.
142. Stewart, "Representations of Love," 144. 163. Caylus, "La vie d'Antoine Watteau," 61.

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Middleman: Antoine Watteau and "Les Charmes de la Vie"

Author(s): Judy Sund

fairly new breed) trained parrots to talk and dogs to move or

3 Watteau, Le prelude au concert,

5 Francois de Troy, Elisabeth Charlotte of Bavaria, Princess of the

well as allegory, and its portrayal of a natural creature

7 Claude III Audran, Singerie for the

8 Teniers the Younger, The Monkey Painter, oil on wood, 9Vi X

scorn?though Watteau's musician fails to attract even that;

10 Peter Paul Rubens, The Coronation

11 Watteau, Three Studies of a Black Youth, ca. 1717, red and

12 Paolo Veronese, The Marriage at Cana (detail), 1562-63, oil

Although the pairing, placement, and outdoor situation of

15 Claude-Francois Vignon, Francoise

and monkey in Antoine Coypel's Black Boy with Fruit (Fig.

18 David Bailly, Vanitas Still Life with

15, 16) ,89 black servants,

for real labor, young attendants were conspicuously orna

21 Watteau, GersainVs Shop Sign, 1720,

them, exemplify nature aestheticized (skin powdered, natu

23 Watteau, Les bergers, ca. 1716-17,

corollaries to the seduction scenes that figure so prominently

25 Louis Jacob after Jean-Antoine

ety and his cranky, often petulant treatment of well-inten

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