Imaginary Portraits
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IMAGINARY PORTRAITS
by Walter Pater
4th edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS
CHAPTER III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK
CHAPTER IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD
CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL
Valenciennes, September 1701.
They have been renovating my father's large workroom. That delightful,
tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green
weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed wall,
opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the coolness,
in summertime. Among old Watteau's workpeople came his son, "the genius,"
my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet
eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed
here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed, and a painter born.
We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of
sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our windows. And just where
the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those
empty niches of the old Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life,
but with a kind of grace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father
pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own
window--which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like
people in some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for
the humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw
a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of
comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought his
sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my father questioned him
and commended his work. But the lad seemed not greatly pleased, and left
untasted the glass of old Malaga which was offered to him. His father will
hear nothing of educating him as a painter. Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has
lately built himself a new stone house, big and grey and cold. Their old
plastered house with the black timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was
prettier; dating from the time of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in
Valenciennes.
October 1701.
Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has consented
to place Antony with a teacher of painting here. I meet him betimes on the
way to his lessons, as I return from Mass; for he still works with the
masons, but making the most of late and early hours, of every moment of
liberty. And then he has the feast-days, of which there are so many in this
old-fashioned place. Ah! such gifts as his, surely, may once in a way make
much industry seem worth while. He makes a wonderful progress. And yet, far
from being set-up, and too easily pleased with what, after all, comes to
him so easily, he has, my father thinks, too little self-approval for
ultimate success. He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with himself
and what he produces. Yet here also there is the "golden mean." Yes! I
could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the
half-melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with him; only that as I can
see, he treats himself to the same quality.
October 1701.
Antony Watteau comes here often now. It is the instinct of a natural
fineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house,
with so little to interest, and that homely old man and woman. The rudeness
of his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces of life
into a physical want, like hunger or thirst, which might come to greed; and
methinks he perhaps overvalues these things. Still, made as he is, his hard
fate in that rude place must needs touch one. And then, he profits by the
experience of my father, who has much knowledge in matters of art beyond his
own art of sculpture; and Antony is not unwelcome to him. In these last
rainy weeks especially, when he can't sketch out of doors, when the wind only
half dries the pavement before another torrent comes, and people stay at home,
and the only sound from without is the creaking of a restless shutter on its
hinges, or the march across the Place of those weary soldiers, coming and
going so interminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the
English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:--Well! he has become like
one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He would go far, in
the literal sense, if he might--to Paris, to Rome. It must be admitted that
our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place; sleepier than ever since it
became French, and ceased to be so near the frontier. The grass is growing
deep on our old ramparts, and it is pleasant to walk there--to walk there
and muse; pleasant for a tame, unambitious soul such as mine.
December 1792.
Antony Watteau left us for Paris this morning. It came upon us quite suddenly.
They amuse themselves in Paris. A scene-painter we have here, well known in
Flanders, has been engaged to work in one of the Parisian play-houses; and
young Watteau, of whom he had some slight knowledge, has departed in his
company. He doesn't know it was I who persuaded the scene-painter to take him;
that he would find the lad useful. We offered him our little presents--fine
thread-lace of our own making for his ruffles, and the like; for one must make
a figure in Paris, and he is slim and well-formed. For myself, I presented him
with a silken purse I had long ago embroidered for another. Well! we shall
follow his fortunes (of which I for one feel quite sure) at a distance. Old
Watteau didn't know of his departure, and has been here in great anger.
December 1703.
Twelve months to-day since Antony went to Paris! The first struggle must be a
sharp one for an unknown lad in that vast, overcrowded place, even if he be as
clever as young Antony Watteau. We may think, however, that he is on the way
to his chosen end, for he returns not home; though, in truth, he tells those
poor old people very little of himself. The apprentices of the M. Metayer for
whom he works, labour all day long, each at a single part only,--coiffure, or
robe, or hand,--of the cheap pictures of religion or fantasy he exposes for
sale at a low price along the footways of the Pont Notre-Dame. Antony is
already the most skilful of them, and seems to have been promoted of late to
work on church pictures. I like the thought of that. He receives three livres
a week for his pains, and his soup daily.
May 1705.
Antony Watteau has parted from the dealer in pictures a bon marche and
works now with a painter of furniture pieces (those headpieces for doors
and the like, now in fashion) who is also concierge of the Palace of the
Luxembourg. Antony is actually lodged somewhere in that grand place, which
contains the king's collection of the Italian pictures he would so
willingly copy. Its gardens also are magnificent, with something, as we
understand from him, altogether of a novel kind in their disposition and
embellishment. Ah! how I delight myself, in fancy at least, in those
beautiful gardens, freer and trimmed less stiffly than those of other royal
houses. Methinks I see him there, when his long summer-day's work is over,
enjoying the cool shade of the stately, broad-foliaged trees, each of which
is a great courtier, though it has its way almost as if it belonged to that
open and unbuilt country beyond, over which the sun is sinking.
His thoughts, however, in the midst of all this, are not wholly away from
home, if I may judge by the subject of a picture he hopes to sell for as
much as sixty livres--Un Depart de Troupes, Soldiers Departing--one of
those scenes of military life one can study so well here at Valenciennes.
June 1705.
Young Watteau has returned home--proof, with a character so independent as
his, that things have gone well with him; and (it is agreed!) stays with
us, instead of in the stone-mason's house. The old people suppose he comes
to us for the sake of my father's instruction. French people as we are
become, we are still old Flemish, if not at heart, yet on the surface.
Even in French Flanders, at Douai and Saint Omer, as I understand, in the
churches and in people's houses, as may be seen from the very streets,
there is noticeable a minute and scrupulous air of care-taking and
neatness. Antony Watteau remarks this more than ever on returning to
Valenciennes, and savours greatly, after his lodging in Paris, our
Flemish cleanliness, lover as he is of distinction and elegance. Those
worldly graces he seemed when a young lad to hunger and thirst for, as
though truly the mere adornments of life were its necessaries, he already
takes as if he had been always used to them. And there is something
noble--shall I say?--in his half-disdainful way of serving himself with
what he still, as I think, secretly values over-much. There is an air of
seemly thought--le bel serieux--about him, which makes me think of one of
those grave old Dutch statesmen in their youth, such as that famous
William the Silent. And yet the effect of this first success of his (of
more importance than its mere money value, as insuring for the future the
full play of his natural powers) I can trace like the bloom of a flower
upon him; and he has, now and then, the gaieties which from time to time,
surely, must refresh all true artists, however hard-working and "painful."
July 1705.
The charm of all this--his physiognomy and manner of being--has touched
even my young brother, Jean-Baptiste. He is greatly taken with Antony,
clings to him almost too attentively, and will be nothing but a painter,
though my father would have trained him to follow his own profession. It
may do the child good. He needs the expansion of some generous sympathy or
sentiment in that close little soul of his, as I have thought, watching
sometimes how his small face and hands are moved in sleep. A child of ten
who cares only to save and possess, to hoard his tiny savings! Yet he is
not otherwise selfish, and loves us all with a warm heart. Just now it is
the moments of Antony's company he counts, like a little miser. Well! that
may save him perhaps from developing a certain meanness of character I
have sometimes feared for him.
August 1705.
We returned home late this summer evening--Antony Watteau, my father and
sisters, young Jean-Baptiste, and myself--from an excursion to Saint-Amand,
in celebration of Antony's last day with us. After visiting the great
abbey-church and its range of chapels, with their costly encumbrance of
carved shrines and golden reliquaries and funeral scutcheons in the
coloured glass, half seen through a rich enclosure of marble and
brasswork, we supped at the little inn in the forest. Antony, looking well
in his new-fashioned, long-skirted coat, and taller than he really is,
made us bring our cream and wild strawberries out of doors, ranging
ourselves according to his judgment (for a hasty sketch in that big
pocket-book he carries) on the soft slope of one of those fresh spaces in
the wood, where the trees unclose a little, while Jean-Baptiste and my
youngest sister danced a minuet on the grass, to the notes of some
strolling lutanist who had found us out. He is visibly cheerful at the
thought of his return to Paris, and became for a moment freer and more
animated than I have ever yet seen him, as he discoursed to us about the
paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the church here. His words, as he spoke
of them, seemed full of a kind of rich sunset with some moving glory within
it. Yet I like far better than any of these pictures of Rubens a work of
that old Dutch master, Peter Porbus, which hangs, though almost out of
sight indeed, in our church at home. The patron saints, simple, and
standing firmly on either side, present two homely old people to Our Lady
enthroned in the midst, with the look and attitude of one for whom, amid
her "glories" (depicted in dim little circular pictures, set in the
openings of a chaplet of pale flowers around her) all feelings are over,
except a great pitifulness. Her robe of shadowy blue suits my eyes better
far than the hot flesh-tints of the Medicean ladies of the great Peter Paul,
in spite of that amplitude and royal ease of action under their stiff court
costumes, at which Antony Watteau declares himself in dismay.
August 1705.
I am just returned from early Mass. I lingered long after the office was
ended, watching, pondering how in the world one could help a small bird
which had flown into the church but could find no way out again. I
suspect it will remain there, fluttering round and round distractedly,
far up under the arched roof till it dies exhausted. I seem to have heard
of a writer who likened man's life to a bird passing just once only, on
some winter night, from window to window, across a cheerfully-lighted hall.
The bird, taken captive by the ill-luck of a moment, re-tracing its
issueless circle till it expires within the close vaulting of that great
stone church:--human life may be like that bird too!
Antony Watteau returned to Paris yesterday. Yes!--Certainly, great heights
of achievement would seem to lie before him; access to regions whither one
may find it increasingly hard to follow him even in imagination, and
figure to one's self after what manner his life moves therein.
January 1709.
Antony Watteau has competed for what is called the Prix de Rome, desiring
greatly to profit by the grand establishment founded at Rome by Lewis the
Fourteenth, for the encouragement of French artists. He obtained only the
second place, but does not renounce his desire to make the journey to
Italy. Could I save enough by careful economies for that purpose? It might
be conveyed to him in some indirect way that would not offend.
February 1712.
We read, with much pleasure for all of us, in the Gazette to-day, among
other events of the world, that Antony Watteau had been elected to the
Academy of Painting under the new title of Peintre des Fetes Galantes,
and had been named also Peintre du Roi. My brother, Jean-Baptiste, ran
to tell the news to old Jean-Philippe and Michelle Watteau.
A new manner of painting! The old furniture of people's rooms must needs
be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with this painting; or
rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit one particular kind
of apartment. A manner of painting greatly prized, as we understand, by
those Parisian judges who have had the best opportunity of acquainting
themselves with whatever is most enjoyable in the arts:--such is the
achievement of the young Watteau! He looks to receive more orders for
his work than he will be able to execute. He will certainly relish--he,
so elegant, so hungry for the colours of life--a free intercourse with
those wealthy lovers of the arts, M. de Crozat, M. de Julienne, the Abbe
de la Roque, the Count de Caylus, and M. Gersaint, the famous dealer in
pictures, who are so anxious to lodge him in their fine hotels, and to
have him of their company at their country houses. Paris, we hear, has
never been wealthier and more luxurious than now: and the great ladies
outbid each other to carry his work upon their very fans. Those vast
fortunes, however, seem to change hands very rapidly. And Antony's new
manner? I am unable even to divine it--to conceive the trick and effect
of it--at all. Only, something of lightness and coquetry I discern there,
at variance, methinks, with his own singular gravity and even sadness of
mien and mind, more answerable to the stately apparelling of the age of
Henry the Fourth, or of Lewis the Thirteenth, in these old, sombre Spanish
houses of ours.
March 1713.
We have all been very happy,--Jean-Baptiste as if in a delightful dream.
Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad's training as a
painter, has most generously offered to receive him for his own pupil.
My father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed to hesitate the first;
but Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antony visibly refines and
beautifies his whole nature, has won the necessary permission, and this
dear young brother will leave us to-morrow. Our regrets and his, at his
parting from us for the first time, overtook our joy at his good fortune
by surprise, at the last moment, as we were about to bid each other
good-night. For a while there had seemed to be an uneasiness under our
cheerful talk, as if each one present were concealing something with an
effort; and it was Jean-Baptiste himself who gave way at last. And then
we sat down again, still together, and allowed free play to what was in
our hearts, almost till morning, my sisters weeping much. I know better
how to control myself. In a few days that delightful new life will have
begun for him: and I have made him promise to write often to us. With how
small a part of my whole life shall I be really living at Valenciennes!
January 1714.
Jean-Philippe Watteau has received a letter from his son to-day. Old
Michelle Watteau, whose sight is failing, though she still works (half
by touch, indeed) at her pillow-lace, was glad to hear me read the letter
aloud more than once. It recounts--how modestly, and almost as a matter
of course!--his late successes. And yet!--does he, in writing to these
old people, purposely underrate his great good fortune and seeming
happiness, not to shock them too much by the contrast between the delicate
enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy and refined, and
that bald existence of theirs in his old home? A life, agitated, exigent,
unsatisfying! That is what this letter really discloses, below so
attractive a surface. As his gift expands so does that incurable
restlessness one supposed but the humour natural to a promising youth
who had still everything to do. And now the only realised enjoyment he
has of all this might seem to be the thought of the independence it has
purchased him, so that he can escape from one lodging-place to another,
just as it may please him. He has already deserted, somewhat incontinently,
more than one of those fine houses, the liberal air of which he used so
greatly to affect, and which have so readily received him. Has he failed
truly to grasp the fact of his great success and the rewards that lie
before him? At all events, he seems, after all, not greatly to value that
dainty world he is now privileged to enter, and has certainly but little
relish for his own works--those works which I for one so thirst to see.
March 1714.
We were all--Jean-Philippe, Michelle Watteau, and ourselves--half in
expectation of a visit from Antony; and to-day, quite suddenly, he is
with us. I was lingering after early Mass this morning in the church of
Saint Vaast. It is good for me to be there. Our people lie under one of
the great marble slabs before the jube, some of the memorial brass
balusters of which are engraved with their names and the dates of their
decease. The settle of carved oak which runs all round the wide nave is
my father's own work. The quiet spaciousness of the place is itself like
a meditation, an "act of recollection," and clears away the confusions
of the heart. I suppose the heavy droning of the carillon had smothered
the sound of his footsteps, for on my turning round, when I supposed
myself alone, Antony Watteau was standing near me. Constant observer as
he is of the lights and shadows of things, he visits places of this kind
at odd times. He has left Jean-Baptiste at work in Paris, and will stay
this time with the old people, not at our house; though he has spent the
better part of to-day in my father's workroom. He hasn't yet put off, in
spite of all his late intercourse with the great world, his distant and
preoccupied manner--a manner, it is true, the same to every one. It is
certainly not through pride in his success, as some might fancy, for he
was thus always. It is rather as if, with all that success, life and its
daily social routine were somewhat of a burden to him.
April 1714.
At last we shall understand something of that new style of his-the
Watteau style--so much relished by the fine people at Paris. He has taken
it into his kind head to paint and decorate our chief salon--the room with
the three long windows, which occupies the first floor of the house.
The room was a landmark, as we used to think, an inviolable milestone and
landmark, of old Valenciennes fashion--that sombre style, indulging much
in contrasts of black or deep brown with white, which the Spaniards left
behind them here. Doubtless their eyes had found its shadows cool and
pleasant, when they shut themselves in from the cutting sunshine of their
own country. But in our country, where we must needs economise not the
shade but the sun, its grandiosity weighs a little on one's spirits.
Well! the rough plaster we used to cover as well as might be with morsels
of old figured arras-work, is replaced by dainty panelling of wood, with
mimic columns, and a quite aerial scrollwork around sunken spaces of a
pale-rose stuff and certain oval openings--two over the doors, opening
on each side of the great couch which faces the windows, one over the
chimney-piece, and one above the buffet which forms its vis-a-vis--four
spaces in all, to be filled by and by with "fantasies" of the Four
Seasons, painted by his own hand. He will send us from Paris arm-chairs
of a new pattern he has devised, suitably covered, and a clavecin. Our
old silver candlesticks look well on the chimney-piece. Odd,
faint-coloured flowers fill coquettishly the little empty spaces here and
there, like ghosts of nosegays left by visitors long ago, which paled thus,
sympathetically, at the decease of their old owners; for, in spite of its
new-fashionedness, all this array is really less like a new thing than the
last surviving result of all the more lightsome adornments of past times.
Only, the very walls seem to cry out:--No! to make delicate insinuation,
for a music, a conversation, nimbler than any we have known, or are likely
to find here. For himself, he converses well, but very sparingly. He
assures us, indeed, that the "new style" is in truth a thing of old days,
of his own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as a
mason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house he was
employed in, with this fairy arrangement--itself like a piece of
"chamber-music," methinks, part answering to part; while no too trenchant
note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of white and pale
red and little golden touches. Yet it is all very comfortable also, it
must be confessed; with an elegant open place for the fire, instead of
the big old stove of brown tiles. The ancient, heavy furniture of our
grandparents goes up, with difficulty, into the garrets, much against my
father's inclination. To reconcile him to the change, Antony is painting
his portrait in a vast perruque and with more vigorous massing of light
and shadow than he is wont to permit himself.
June 1714.
He has completed the ovals:--The Four Seasons. Oh! the summerlike grace,
the freedom and softness, of the "Summer"--a hayfield such as we visited
to-day, but boundless, and with touches of level Italian architecture in
the hot, white, elusive distance, and wreaths of flowers, fairy hayrakes
and the like, suspended from tree to tree, with that wonderful lightness
which is one of the charms of his work. I can understand through this, at
last, what it is he enjoys, what he selects by preference, from all that
various world we pass our lives in. I am struck by the purity of the room
he has re-fashioned for us--a sort of MORAL purity; yet, in the FORMS and
COLOURS of things. Is the actual life of Paris, to which he will soon
return, equally pure, that it relishes this kind of thing so strongly?
Only, methinks 'tis a pity to incorporate so much of his work, of himself,
with objects of use, which must perish by use, or disappear, like our own
old furniture, with mere change of fashion.
July 1714.
On the last day of Antony Watteau's visit we made a party to Cambrai.
We entered the cathedral church: it was the hour of Vespers, and it
happened that Monseigneur le Prince de Cambrai, the author of Telemaque,
was in his place in the choir. He appears to be of great age, assists
but rarely at the offices of religion, and is never to be seen in Paris;
and Antony had much desired to behold him. Certainly it was worth while
to have come so far only to see him, and hear him give his pontifical
blessing, in a voice feeble but of infinite sweetness, and with an
inexpressibly graceful movement of the hands. A veritable grand seigneur!
His refined old age, the impress of genius and honours, even his
disappointments, concur with natural graces to make him seem too
distinguished (a fitter word fails me) for this world. Omnia vanitas! he
seems to say, yet with a profound resignation, which makes the things we
are most of us so fondly occupied with look petty enough. Omnia vanitas!
Is that indeed the proper comment on our lives, coming, as it does in this
case, from one who might have made his own all that life has to bestow?
Yet he was never to be seen at court, and has lived here almost as an exile.
Was our "Great King Lewis" jealous of a true grand seigneur or grand
monarque by natural gift and the favour of heaven, that he could not endure
his presence?
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