Late-nineteenth-century books about the French artist Watteau (1684–1721) betray a curious blind spot: more than any single artist before or since, Watteau provided his age with an influential image of itself, and nineteenth-century writers accepted this image as genuine. This was largely due to the enterprise of Watteau’s friends who, soon after for biographers to refer to him as “the personification of the witty and amiable eighteenth century.”
In fact, Watteau saw little enough of that “witty and amiable” century for which so much nostalgia was generally felt between about 1870 and 1920, a period during which enthusiasm for the artist reached its peak. The eighteenth century’s first decades, the period of his artistic activity, were fairly calamitous ones. During the year of Watteau’s first Paris successes, was marked by military defeat and a disastrous famine.
Most of Watteau’s nineteenth-century admirers simply ignored the grim background of the works they found so lyrical and charming. Those who took the inconvenient historical facts into consideration did so only in order to refute the widely held deterministic view that the content and style of an artist’s work were absolutely dictated record the society he knew, but rather “foresaw” a society that developed shortly after his death.
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