French painter,
who is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of the rococo period,
which corresponded roughly to the reign of King Louis XV (1715-1774). Watteau
is also considered a forerunner of 19th-century impressionism. Watteau was born in Valenciennes, a Flemish town that had come under French rule shortly before his birth. At the age of 14 he began to study in his native town under an obscure painter of religious subjects. In 1702 he went to Paris, where he made a meager living as a painter for a dealer of cheap devotional, or religious, pictures. He later studied under French engraver and stage designer Claude Gillot, from whom he gained an interest in the character of the fashionable Italian commedia dell'arte.
About 1708 Watteau began to work with French decorative artist Claude Audran, curator of the Luxembourg Palace collections. There he had an opportunity to study a great series of baroque paintings by Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. In 1709 Watteau placed second in the competition for the Prix de Rome, presented by the French Academy in Rome, and thereafter received many important commissions. Named an associate of the French Academy in Paris in 1712, he was elected to full membership in 1717. Watteau, who had a frail constitution and was often ill, succumbed to tuberculosis and died in Nogent-sur-Marne.
Watteau's canvases reflect the influence of the great Flemish painters, particularly Rubens, and of the Venetian school of painting. His own distinctive style, however, demonstrated a feeling for light and color and offered a delicate sensuousness and lyric grace that had been previously unexplored. Other rococo painters imitated Watteau's style, but they failed to achieve the dreamlike quality of his paintings. Watteau's reputation declined with the rise of neoclassicism in French art, but after the French Revolution (1789-1799), and especially in the romantic period (about 1800-1850), it rose again.
Among Watteau's favorite subjects were fashionable outdoor gatherings, known as fêtes galantes (French for "scenes of gallantry"), in which elegant court ladies and gentlemen pass their time among trees and shrubbery. His masterpiece in this category is The Embarkation for the Island of Cythera (1717, Louvre, Paris). Another favorite subject was clowns, harlequins, and other figures from the commedia dell'arte, such as Harlequin and Columbine (1715, Wallace Collection, London). Gersaint's Signboard (1720, Charlottenburg, Berlin), a signboard painted for the shop of an art dealer and friend of Watteau, is a masterpiece of realism in its composition and drawing. His use of color in this work influenced 19th-century impressionism.