Une amitié paradoxale : Antoine Watteau et le comte de Caylus (1712-1719)

1712 and 1719 a close friendship united Antoine Watteau and comte de Caylus, the great-nephew of Madame de Maintenon. The young count, who had abandoned military service in 1714 to devote himself to art, the theatre and pleasure, is the perfect example of an appetite for personal happiness which swept through Paris at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. The Moderns had freed the City from the overpowering civic and martial model of Rome and Athens. The theme of "Fetes galantes" had appeared in the new opera-ballets. La Fontaine's literary epicurianism was reflected in the artistic world by the theories of Roger de Piles. Charles de La Fosse, a friend of the latter, presented Watteau to the patron-collector Pierre Crozat, where the artist met Caylus. An identical epicurian Stimmung brought them together. The Pelerinage a l'ile de Cythere in 1717 is a manifestation of this encounter. As a vehicule for the libertine philosophy of duration, pleasure and pain, it was a radical subversion of the academic metier and conventions by depicting fleeting and elusive feelings, emotions, and states of mind. Between 1712 and 1719 Calyus and Watteau would study life drawing, the Old masters, nature, and the lower classes of Paris together. However, their friendship suddenly came to an end in 1719. In the last few years of his life, Watteau also broke with Crozat and the entire academic milieu. After the death of the artist, Caylus' evolution would make him the leader of the fight against "rocaille" libertinage and a supporter of a return to Classical models. In 1748, he wrote a Vie de Watteau for the Academie de Peinture, which as much a celebration as an indictment of "the painter of fetes galantes". Madame de Maintenon's grand-son could no longer recognize himself in the portrait which Watteau had apparently painted of him in 1720 (Louvre), in which he is portrayed as a refined and sceptical sensualist, an allegorical image of fashionable epicurianism. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.