IMAGINARY PORTRAITS(幻像)
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IMAGINARY PORTRAITS
1
IMAGINARY
PORTRAITS
by Walter Pater
4th edition
IMAGINARY PORTRAITS
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF COURT PAINTERS
CHAPTER II. DENYS L'AUXERROIS
CHAPTER III. SEBASTIAN VAN STORCK
CHAPTER IV. DUKE CARL OF ROSENMOLD
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CHAPTER I. A PRINCE OF
COURT PAINTERS
EXTRACTS FROM AN OLD FRENCH JOURNAL
Valenciennes, September 1701.
They have been renovating my father's large workroom. That
delightful, tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the
green weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed
wall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the coolness, in
summertime. Among old Watteau's workpeople came his son, "the
genius," my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose
large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings
which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed,
and a painter born. We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a
wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our
windows. And just where the crowd was busiest young Antony was found,
hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old Hotel de Ville, sketching
the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace--a marvellous tact of
omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality
seen from one's own window--which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown,
and Columbine, seem like people in some fairyland; or like infinitely
clever tragic actors, who, for the humour of the thing, have put on motley
for once, and are able to throw a world of serious innuendo into their
burlesque looks, with a sort of comedy which shall be but tragedy seen
from the other side. He brought his sketch to our house to-day, and I was
present when my father questioned him and commended his work. But the
lad seemed not greatly pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga
which was offered to him. His father will hear nothing of educating him
as a painter. Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built himself a new stone
house, big and grey and cold. Their old plastered house with the black
timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was prettier; dating from the time of
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the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in Valenciennes.
October 1701.
Chiefly through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has
consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here. I meet him
betimes on the way to his lessons, as I return from Mass; for he still works
with the masons, but making the most of late and early hours, of every
moment of liberty. And then he has the feast-days, of which there are so
many in this old-fashioned place. Ah! such gifts as his, surely, may once in
a way make much industry seem worth while. He makes a wonderful
progress. And yet, far from being set-up, and too easily pleased with what,
after all, comes to him so easily, he has, my father thinks, too little self-
approval for ultimate success. He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily
with himself and what he produces. Yet here also there is the "golden
mean." Yes! I could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which
sometimes crosses the half-melancholy sweetness of manner habitual with
him; only that as I can see, he treats himself to the same quality.
October 1701.
Antony Watteau comes here often now. It is the instinct of a natural
fineness in him, to escape when he can from that blank stone house, with
so little to interest, and that homely old man and woman. The rudeness of
his home has turned his feeling for even the simpler graces of life into a
physical want, like hunger or thirst, which might come to greed; and
methinks he perhaps overvalues these things. Still, made as he is, his hard
fate in that rude place must needs touch one. And then, he profits by the
experience of my father, who has much knowledge in matters of art
beyond his own art of sculpture; and Antony is not unwelcome to him. In
these last rainy weeks especially, when he can't sketch out of doors, when
the wind only half dries the pavement before another torrent comes, and
people stay at home, and the only sound from without is the creaking of a
restless shutter on its hinges, or the march across the Place of those weary
soldiers, coming and going so interminably, one hardly knows whether to
or from battle with the English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:--
Well! he has become like one of our family. "He will go far!" my father
declares. He would go far, in the literal sense, if he might--to Paris, to
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Rome. It must be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy
place; sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near
the frontier. The grass is growing deep on our old ramparts, and it is
pleasant to walk there--to walk there and muse; pleasant for a tame,
unambitious soul such as mine.
December 1792.
Antony Watteau left us for Paris this morning. It came upon us quite
suddenly. They amuse themselves in Paris. A scene-painter we have here,
well known in Flanders, has been engaged to work in one of the Parisian
play-houses; and young Watteau, of whom he had some slight knowledge,
has departed in his company. He doesn't know it was I who persuaded the
scene-painter to take him; that he would find the lad useful. We offered
him our little presents--fine thread-lace of our own making for his ruffles,
and the like; for one must make a figure in Paris, and he is slim and well-
formed. For myself, I presented him with a silken purse I had long ago
embroidered for another. Well! we shall follow his fortunes (of which I for
one feel quite sure) at a distance. Old Watteau didn't know of his departure,
and has been here in great anger.
December 1703.
Twelve months to-day since Antony went to Paris! The first struggle
must be a sharp one for an unknown lad in that vast, overcrowded place,
even if he be as clever as young Antony Watteau. We may think, however,
that he is on the way to his chosen end, for he returns not home; though, in
truth, he tells those poor old people very little of himself. The apprentices
of the M. Metayer for whom he works, labour all day long, each at a single
part only,--coiffure, or robe, or hand,--of the cheap pictures of religion or
fantasy he exposes for sale at a low price along the footways of the Pont
Notre-Dame. Antony is already the most skilful of them, and seems to
have been promoted of late to work on church pictures. I like the thought
of that. He receives three livres a week for his pains, and his soup daily.
May 1705.
Antony Watteau has parted from the dealer in pictures a bon marche
and works now with a painter of furniture pieces (those headpieces for
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doors and the like, now in fashion) who is also concierge of the Palace of
the Luxembourg. Antony is actually lodged somewhere in that grand place,
which contains the king's collection of the Italian pictures he would so
willingly copy. Its gardens also are magnificent, with something, as we
understand from him, altogether of a novel kind in their disposition and
embellishment. Ah! how I delight myself, in fancy at least, in those
beautiful gardens, freer and trimmed less stiffly than those of other royal
houses. Methinks I see him there, when his long summer-day's work is
over, enjoying the cool shade of the stately, broad-foliaged trees, each of
which is a great courtier, though it has its way almost as if it belonged to
that open and unbuilt country beyond, over which the sun is sinking.
His thoughts, however, in the midst of all this, are not wholly away
from home, if I may judge by the subject of a picture he hopes to sell for
as much as sixty livres--Un Depart de Troupes, Soldiers Departing--one of
those scenes of military life one can study so well here at Valenciennes.
June 1705.
Young Watteau has returned home--proof, with a character so
independent as his, that things have gone well with him; and (it is agreed!)
stays with us, instead of in the stone-mason's house. The old people
suppose he comes to us for the sake of my father's instruction. French
people as we are become, we are still old Flemish, if not at heart, yet on
the surface. Even in French Flanders, at Douai and Saint Omer, as I
understand, in the churches and in people's houses, as may be seen from
the very streets, there is noticeable a minute and scrupulous air of care-
taking and neatness. Antony Watteau remarks this more than ever on
returning to Valenciennes, and savours greatly, after his lodging in Paris,
our Flemish cleanliness, lover as he is of distinction and elegance. Those
worldly graces he seemed when a young lad to hunger and thirst for, as
though truly the mere adornments of life were its necessaries, he already
takes as if he had been always used to them. And there is something noble-
-shall I say?--in his half-disdainful way of serving himself with what he
still, as I think, secretly values over-much. There is an air of seemly
thought--le bel serieux--about him, which makes me think of one of those
grave old Dutch statesmen in their youth, such as that famous William the
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Silent. And yet the effect of this first success of his (of more importance
than its mere money value, as insuring for the future the full play of his
natural powers) I can trace like the bloom of a flower upon him; and he
has, now and then, the gaieties which from time to time, surely, must
refresh all true artists, however hard-working and "painful."
July 1705.
The charm of all this--his physiognomy and manner of being--has
touched even my young brother, Jean-Baptiste. He is greatly taken with
Antony, clings to him almost too attentively, and will be nothing but a
painter, though my father would have trained him to follow his own
profession. It may do the child good. He needs the expansion of some
generous sympathy or sentiment in that close little soul of his, as I have
thought, watching sometimes how his small face and hands are moved in
sleep. A child of ten who cares only to save and possess, to hoard his tiny
savings! Yet he is not otherwise selfish, and loves us all with a warm heart.
Just now it is the moments of Antony's company he counts, like a little
miser. Well! that may save him perhaps from developing a certain
meanness of character I have sometimes feared for him.
August 1705.
We returned home late this summer evening--Antony Watteau, my
father and sisters, young Jean-Baptiste, and myself--from an excursion to
Saint-Amand, in celebration of Antony's last day with us. After visiting the
great abbey-church and its range of chapels, with their costly encumbrance
of carved shrines and golden reliquaries and funeral scutcheons in the
coloured glass, half seen through a rich enclosure of marble and brasswork,
we supped at the little inn in the forest. Antony, looking well in his new-
fashioned, long-skirted coat, and taller than he really is, made us bring our
cream and wild strawberries out of doors, ranging ourselves according to
his judgment (for a hasty sketch in that big pocket-book he carries) on the
soft slope of one of those fresh spaces in the wood, where the trees
unclose a little, while Jean-Baptiste and my youngest sister danced a
minuet on the grass, to the notes of some strolling lutanist who had found
us out. He is visibly cheerful at the thought of his return to Paris, and
became for a moment freer and more animated than I have ever yet seen
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him, as he discoursed to us about the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens in the
church here. His words, as he spoke of them, seemed full of a kind of rich
sunset with some moving glory within it. Yet I like far better than any of
these pictures of Rubens a work of that old Dutch master, Peter Porbus,
which hangs, though almost out of sight indeed, in our church at home.
The patron saints, simple, and standing firmly on either side, present two
homely old people to Our Lady enthroned in the midst, with the look and
attitude of one for whom, amid her "glories" (depicted in dim little circular
pictures, set in the openings of a chaplet of pale flowers around her) all
feelings are over, except a great pitifulness. Her robe of shadowy blue
suits my eyes better far than the hot flesh-tints of the Medicean ladies of
the great Peter Paul, in spite of that amplitude and royal ease of action
under their stiff court costumes, at which Antony Watteau declares himself
in dismay.
August 1705.
I am just returned from early Mass. I lingered long after the office was
ended, watching, pondering how in the world one could help a small bird
which had flown into the church but could find no way out again. I suspect
it will remain there, fluttering round and round distractedly, far up under
the arched roof till it dies exhausted. I seem to have heard of a writer who
likened man's life to a bird passing just once only, on some winter night,
from window to window, across a cheerfully-lighted hall. The bird, taken
captive by the ill-luck of a moment, re-tracing its issueless circle till it
expires within the close vaulting of that great stone church:--human life
may be like that bird too!
Antony Watteau returned to Paris yesterday. Yes!--Certainly, great
heights of achievement would seem to lie before him; access to regions
whither one may find it increasingly hard to follow him even in
imagination, and figure to one's self after what manner his life moves
therein.
January 1709.
Antony Watteau has competed for what is called the Prix de Rome,
desiring greatly to profit by the grand establishment founded at Rome by
Lewis the Fourteenth, for the encouragement of French artists. He
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obtained only the second place, but does not renounce his desire to make
the journey to Italy. Could I save enough by careful economies for that
purpose? It might be conveyed to him in some indirect way that would not
offend.
February 1712.
We read, with much pleasure for all of us, in the Gazette to-day,
among other events of the world, that Antony Watteau had been elected to
the Academy of Painting under the new title of Peintre des Fetes Galantes,
and had been named also Peintre du Roi. My brother, Jean-Baptiste, ran to
tell the news to old Jean-Philippe and Michelle Watteau.
A new manner of painting! The old furniture of people's rooms must
needs be changed throughout, it would seem, to accord with this painting;
or rather, the painting is designed exclusively to suit one particular kind of
apartment. A manner of painting greatly prized, as we understand, by those
Parisian judges who have had the best opportunity of acquainting
themselves with whatever is most enjoyable in the arts:--such is the
achievement of the young Watteau! He looks to receive more orders for
his work than he will be able to execute. He will certainly relish--he, so
elegant, so hungry for the colours of life--a free intercourse with those
wealthy lovers of the arts, M. de Crozat, M. de Julienne, the Abbe de la
Roque, the Count de Caylus, and M. Gersaint, the famous dealer in
pictures, who are so anxious to lodge him in their fine hotels, and to have
him of their company at their country houses. Paris, we hear, has never
been wealthier and more luxurious than now: and the great ladies outbid
each other to carry his work upon their very fans. Those vast fortunes,
however, seem to change hands very rapidly. And Antony's new manner? I
am unable even to divine it--to conceive the trick and effect of it--at all.
Only, something of lightness and coquetry I discern there, at variance,
methinks, with his own singular gravity and even sadness of mien and
mind, more answerable to the stately apparelling of the age of Henry the
Fourth, or of Lewis the Thirteenth, in these old, sombre Spanish houses of
ours.
March 1713.
We have all been very happy,--Jean-Baptiste as if in a delightful dream.
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Antony Watteau, being consulted with regard to the lad's training as a
painter, has most generously offered to receive him for his own pupil. My
father, for some reason unknown to me, seemed to hesitate the first; but
Jean-Baptiste, whose enthusiasm for Antony visibly refines and beautifies
his whole nature, has won the necessary permission, and this dear young
brother will leave us to-morrow. Our regrets and his, at his parting from us
for the first time, overtook our joy at his good fortune by surprise, at the
last moment, as we were about to bid each other good-night. For a while
there had seemed to be an uneasiness under our cheerful talk, as if each
one present were concealing something with an effort; and it was Jean-
Baptiste himself who gave way at last. And then we sat down again, still
together, and allowed free play to what was in our hearts, almost till
morning, my sisters weeping much. I know better how to control myself.
In a few days that delightful new life will have begun for him: and I have
made him promise to write often to us. With how small a part of my whole
life shall I be really living at Valenciennes!
January 1714.
Jean-Philippe Watteau has received a letter from his son to-day. Old
Michelle Watteau, whose sight is failing, though she still works (half by
touch, indeed) at her pillow-lace, was glad to hear me read the letter aloud
more than once. It recounts--how modestly, and almost as a matter of
course!--his late successes. And yet!--does he, in writing to these old
people, purposely underrate his great good fortune and seeming happiness,
not to shock them too much by the contrast between the delicate
enjoyments of the life he now leads among the wealthy and refined, and
that bald existence of theirs in his old home? A life, agitated, exigent,
unsatisfying! That is what this letter really discloses, below so attractive a
surface. As his gift expands so does that incurable restlessness one
supposed but the humour natural to a promising youth who had still
everything to do. And now the only realised enjoyment he has of all this
might seem to be the thought of the independence it has purchased him, so
that he can escape from one lodging-place to another, just as it may please
him. He has already deserted, somewhat incontinently, more than one of
those fine houses, the liberal air of which he used so greatly to affect, and
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IMAGINARYPORTRAITS1IMAGINARYPORTRAITSbyWalterPater4theditionIMAGINARYPORTRAITS2CONTENTSCHAPTERI.APRINCEOFCOURTPAINTERSCHAPTERII.DENYSL'AUXERROISCHAPTERIII.SEBASTIANVANSTORCKCHAPTERIV.DUKECARLOFROSENMOLDIMAGINARYPORTRAITS3CHAPTERI.APRINCEOFCOURTPAINTERSEXTRACTSFROMANOLDFRENCHJOURNALValenciennes,Septe...
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