拍品专文
Although most of Watteau's painted compositions are set out of doors, 'pure' landscapes are rare in his oeuvre. La Chute d'eau ('Landscape with a Waterfall') is one of the few to survive that can be securely attributed to the artist and documented to the years immediately after his death. (Not more than a half-dozen pure landscapes are known today, including the Paysage à la rivière in the Hermitage, St Petersburg and the small panel Paysage à la chèvre in the Louvre, Paris, both unrecorded by Watteau's contemporaries.) The present painting was engraved by Jean Moyreau for inclusion in the Recueil Jullienne, and, indeed, the print was announced in the Mercure de France in March 1729.
Venetian landscape drawings by Titian and Campagnola, of the type that Watteau is known to have studied and copied in the collection of his patron Pierre Crozat, are often posited as influences on La Chute d'eau, but Guillaume Glorieux (op. cit., Valenciennes 2004) has ingeniously proposed an engraving by Aegidius Sadeler (c. 1570-1629) - itself based on a composition of The Rest of the Flight into Egypt by Jan Breughel the Elder - as the model for Watteau's landscape. While Watteau transformed Sadeler's New Testament episode into an unhurried and supremely secular déjeunner sur l'herbe, almost all of the distinctive elements found in the print - the double waterfall that combines into a single stream as it falls over a rocky outcropping, the rustic fabriques on the distant hilltop, the overwhelming sense of immense natural grandeur - reappear in Watteau's luminous pastoral.
Although it has few obvious comparisons in Watteau's oeuvre, La Chute d'eau is relatively easy to date. The schematic poplar trees and large, comparatively flat planes of the landscape, so reminiscent of painted stage backdrops, are very similar to those found in the parkland settings of the earliest fêtes galantes, such as La conversation (CR.105; Toledo Museum of Art) and Le Bal champêtre (CR. 92; De Noailles collection, France), two paintings which are datable to around 1712-1713. A single known figure drawing is associated with La Chute, depicting the reclining man who rests on his elbow just to the right of the waterfall; the sketch appears on a sheet comprising a half-dozen studies of seated male figures in Stockholm (PR.122) that is generally dated around 1711. (This sheet is amoung the group of red-chalk counterproofs acquired by Count Tessin directly from Watteau during the Swedish connoisseur's 1715 visit to Paris, providing a terminus ante quem for the painting as well.) Finally, the charming figural group in La Chute d'eau - with its two flirtatious couples, curious dog, and even more attentive shepherd - strongly evokes the figure types of Watteau's teacher Claude Gillot, and are almost identical in handling to the figures in Watteau's mythological parody Fêtes du dieu Pan (CR. 9; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), a painting almost certainly datable to 1711-1712. Likewise, 1711-1712 is the most likely date for La Chute d'eau.
The painting will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Watteau's paintings by Alan Wintermute, currently in preparation.
Venetian landscape drawings by Titian and Campagnola, of the type that Watteau is known to have studied and copied in the collection of his patron Pierre Crozat, are often posited as influences on La Chute d'eau, but Guillaume Glorieux (op. cit., Valenciennes 2004) has ingeniously proposed an engraving by Aegidius Sadeler (c. 1570-1629) - itself based on a composition of The Rest of the Flight into Egypt by Jan Breughel the Elder - as the model for Watteau's landscape. While Watteau transformed Sadeler's New Testament episode into an unhurried and supremely secular déjeunner sur l'herbe, almost all of the distinctive elements found in the print - the double waterfall that combines into a single stream as it falls over a rocky outcropping, the rustic fabriques on the distant hilltop, the overwhelming sense of immense natural grandeur - reappear in Watteau's luminous pastoral.
Although it has few obvious comparisons in Watteau's oeuvre, La Chute d'eau is relatively easy to date. The schematic poplar trees and large, comparatively flat planes of the landscape, so reminiscent of painted stage backdrops, are very similar to those found in the parkland settings of the earliest fêtes galantes, such as La conversation (CR.105; Toledo Museum of Art) and Le Bal champêtre (CR. 92; De Noailles collection, France), two paintings which are datable to around 1712-1713. A single known figure drawing is associated with La Chute, depicting the reclining man who rests on his elbow just to the right of the waterfall; the sketch appears on a sheet comprising a half-dozen studies of seated male figures in Stockholm (PR.122) that is generally dated around 1711. (This sheet is amoung the group of red-chalk counterproofs acquired by Count Tessin directly from Watteau during the Swedish connoisseur's 1715 visit to Paris, providing a terminus ante quem for the painting as well.) Finally, the charming figural group in La Chute d'eau - with its two flirtatious couples, curious dog, and even more attentive shepherd - strongly evokes the figure types of Watteau's teacher Claude Gillot, and are almost identical in handling to the figures in Watteau's mythological parody Fêtes du dieu Pan (CR. 9; Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles), a painting almost certainly datable to 1711-1712. Likewise, 1711-1712 is the most likely date for La Chute d'eau.
The painting will appear in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Watteau's paintings by Alan Wintermute, currently in preparation.