The Painter's Secret Geometry by Charles Bouleau

Author:Charles Bouleau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2013-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

Watteau: Embarkation to Cythera. The slow procession follows an extremely simple basic scheme: the armature of the rectangle. It could be one used by Claude Lorrain. But the next illustration will show to what masterly subtlety Watteau sometimes carried the science of composition. (Paris, Louvre. Archives photographiques)

Claude Lorrain died in 1682, Watteau was born in 1684. Watteau took the poetic feeling of Claude Lorrain and gave it more actuality. Claude takes us into mythological landscapes, shows us harbours of Antiquity bathed in a dreaming light. Watteau’s fairyland is close to his, yet there is a world between. The comedies of Molière had brought real life nearer to art, and the people in Watteau’s pictures are his contemporaries; what is more, they are not used, like those of Claude, to animate a landscape, but have a life of their own, like those of Rembrandt. They seem, in the midst of their diversions, to have other thoughts, and often those thoughts are sad. Compare them with the peasants of Rubens, in his Kermess: these are gay lads, absorbed in the pleasure of the moment; between them and Watteau’s elegant people has stepped the doubt of the libertines, their ‘what is the good of it all?’ The Indifferent is only a dancer, but the name suits him well; he and his companions make one think of actors sad at leaving the world of illusion—the illusion of life.

When Watteau set out to paint a picture, he chose from among the mass of his admirable drawings, with their movingly restrained strokes, the elements he needed, and then arranged them with a combination of ease and strictness. Like Claude Lorrain, he began by taking as his basis simply the armature of the rectangle (Embarkation to Cythera). But very soon he came to prefer the refinements that can be obtained from the intersection of the rectangle’s diagonals with those of the squares. This method was not new: Poussin had already used it, though more soberly; and the nineteenth-century artists were to show a predilection for it; to David and his pupils it was to become an obsessive practice, to Delacroix a convenient and discreet device. But we must go as far as Seurat before we find, in a very different interpretation, subtleties comparable to those of Watteau (in the Charms of Life, Gersaint’s Signboard, etc.). Let us pay special attention to Gilles , that simple yet astonishing figure: why is he not in the centre of the picture? The diagonals of the squares on the shorter sides supply the key to this eccentricity—and determine the figure’s position with a striking directness.

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