Watteau, Music, and Theater, the first exhibition of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s paintings in the United States in 25 years, will be presented at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 22 through November 29. The exhibition will demonstrate the place of music and theater in Watteau’s art, exploring the tension between an imagery of power, associated with the court of Louis XIV, and a more optimistic and mildly subversive imagery of pleasure that was developed in opera-ballet and theater early in the 18th century. It will demonstrate that the painter’s vision was influenced directly by musical works devoted to the island of Cythera, the home of Venus, and to the Venetian carnival, and will shed new light on a number of Watteau’s pictures.
The exhibition is made possible by The Florence Gould Foundation.
It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
Watteau, Music, and Theater features more than 60 works of art, consisting of major loans of paintings and drawings by Watteau and his contemporaries from collections in the United States and Europe, in addition to material drawn from various departments of the Metropolitan Museum, including musical instruments, porcelain, and prints.
Watteau, Music, and Theater will honor Philippe de Montebello, Director Emeritus of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jean-Antoine Watteau, widely considered the most important artist in France and possibly all of Europe in the early 18th-century, is among the best known and least understood of the Old Master painters. Born in 1684 in Valenciennes in the Hainault (French, but formerly part of the Spanish Netherlands), Watteau was the son of a roofer and probably received limited formal education before he arrived in Paris in 1702. This solitary, ill-educated, self-taught, largely itinerant figure was a supremely gifted painter and draftsman whose surviving works of art are his testament. Most of them are so-called fêtes galantes, idyllic scenes that have no specifically identifiable subject. Only one of Watteau’s paintings, The Embarkation for Cythera (1717), was publicly exhibited in his lifetime. His career is little documented, he did not sign or date his paintings, and few commissions are recorded. His paintings and drawings, however, reveal a fascination with the performing arts of both music and theater. Watteau died in 1720 at the age of 36 after a long illness.
While relatively little is known about Watteau, an expanding body of literature relating to Paris opera-ballet, plays, and the less formal and more traditional seasonal théâtres de la foire relates to specific works in the exhibition, and these can now be mined more deeply to examine the artist’s life and work.
Among the many highlights of Watteau, Music, and Theater will be the Metropolitan Museum’s Watteau paintings Mezzetin and French Comedians; the Städel Museum’s The Island of Cythera; Pleasures of the Dance from the Dulwich Picture Gallery; Love in the French Theater and Love in the Italian Theater, both from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin; and The Alliance of Music and Comedy (private collection), which has not been on view in any museum in decades.
The exhibition will mark the first time the painting La Surprise (private collection) will be seen in a museum. Lost for almost 200 years and presumed to have been destroyed, La Surprise was rediscovered last year in a British country house and later sold at auction.
Exquisite drawings by Watteau, including works from the Art Institute of Chicago, The Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Massachusetts, and The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, will also be featured.
Other lenders to the exhibition are Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brodick Castle, Isle of Arran (National Trust for Scotland); Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Schloss Sansoucci, Potsdam (Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg); Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Pictures by Lancret will come from Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, Dallas; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
The exhibition will also include works by contemporaries of Watteau, including Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Pater, who were influenced by him; fine drawings and engravings by other 18th-century European artists; Meissen porcelain figures depicting theatrical characters; and musical instruments of the era, including a rare Musette de Cour, or early bagpipe, from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection.
The exhibition is organized by Katharine Baetjer, Curator in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of European Paintings, with Georgia J. Cowart, Professor in the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
