"Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood" [2015–2016 James L. Clifford Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)]

Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood Aaron Wile In painting . . . the content is subjectivity, more precisely the inner life particularized, and for this very reason the separation in the work of art between its subject and the spectator must emerge and yet must immediately be dissipated because, by displacing what is subjective, the work, in its whole mode of presentation, reveals its purpose as existing not independently on its own account but for subjective apprehension, for the spectator. —Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen 1 € u € ber die Asthetik For the perfect fl^ a neur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. . . . The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. —Charles Baudelaire, Le peintre de la vie moderne2 Antoine Watteau, painter of reverie—I am, I realize, trotting out an old warhorse. Watteau paints “a dream in which there is nothing to do but listen to one’s heart and leave free utterances to one’s mood,” Jules and Edmond de Goncourt proclaim in L’ art du XVIIIe si"e cle, and they have hardly been e Huyghe, for example, declares alone in thinking so.3 Ren# that, with Watteau, “painting is no longer something to be understood, but something only to be felt, to be dreamed [r^ e v#e ].”4 Even Donald Posner, in every other respect as stern a critic of the Goncourts as any, writes, “One might say that Watteau dreamed better than his contemporaries, and that he refined and heightened their dreams; in a sense, he dreamed for them.”5 In fact, the Goncourts and Huyghe and Posner intuit something crucial about Watteau’s work. But we are left wondering what it means exactly that he painted dreams or that he dreamed for his contemporaries or, most radically, that his paintings were meant to be dreamed. Reverie in Watteau, it turns out, has largely evaded scrutiny. Only Norman Bryson, in his landmark essay “Watteau and Reverie,” has given the notion the consideration it deserves. Turning on a brilliant deconstruction of nineteenth-century writings on Watteau, especially the Goncourts’, Bryson’s discussion links the production of reverie to the artist’s subversion of pictorial narrative. Refusing a one-to-one relation between the painterly signifier and a fixed linguistic signified, Watteau presents the viewer with a “semantic vacuum”: backs are turned, faces obscured, costumes fantastic, and gestures enigmatic—everything is rendered illegible at the same time that it demands interpretation. The antinarrativity of Watteau’s bodies triggers an outpouring of discourse that attempts to capture, as a “mood,” the paintings’ abiding ambiguity, to compensate for a lack inherent in the figural sign that refuses to be filled. This verbal rush, which has no object and cannot engage with the pictures themselves, Bryson designates as the literary form of reverie.6 Bryson’s insights are revelatory, but his structuralist framework fails to historicize Watteau’s enterprise properly. First, although his observation about the incommensurability of word and image in Watteau’s work is well taken, Bryson assumes the relation between the two is its defining characteristic. In fact, the theoretical battles around dessein and color in the last third of the seventeenth century, and the subsequent victory of the colorists in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, had already shifted emphasis away from discourse and narrative to pictorial effects as the motors of visual representation.7 Any interpretation of Watteau that seeks to stay close to the period’s art discourse must therefore foreground its formal dimension. Second, by basing his interpretation around nineteenth-century sources, Bryson treats reverie as an exclusively “literary form,” as necessarily linguistic. The claim that the Goncourts’ flowery effusions are symptomatic of a structural effect of Watteau’s paintings persuades still, but the Goncourts’ highly subjective mode of ekphrasis is itself historically conditioned and foreign to Watteau’s age. Reverie, contrary to the way Bryson portrays it, is a culturally and historically variable phenomenon— especially pertinent since the word had taken on its modern sense as a kind of mental wandering only shortly before Watteau was painting. Understood historically, reverie in Watteau turns out to be not so much a discursive flow chasing after a painterly signifier with which it cannot hope to catch up as an affective relation to the canvas that proceeds from the paintings’ formal and material condition. These observations lead to a new understanding of Watteau’s invitation to reverie, specifically in a selection of the f e^tes galantes, the genre pioneered and perfected by the artist after 1710.8 It is rooted, first, in the paintings’ pictorial effects and the modes of viewing they elicited, and, second, in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century sources on reverie. In an effort to mediate between these two domains and open up pictorial form to the cultural field that encompasses reverie, I turn to the artistic theories that prevailed in France at the time, particularly those of Roger de Piles, and attempt to probe their connection to larger aesthetic discourses of the Grand Si" ecle.9 With de Piles’s theories as my point of departure, my approach emphasizes the material and formal qualities of Watteau’s paintings—not to dismiss their narrative or iconographic significance (or lack thereof), but rather to probe what was at the time the more urgent question of how they engaged viewers on a sensual level. Like Bryson, I take the body as my starting point. But the story I trace, as I move through various artistic and literary debates of the period, offers a different picture of Watteau: as an artist engaged, more deeply than any painter of his generation, with new kinds of subjective and cultural experience—as a painter of modern selfhood. The Querelle du Coloris and the Ascendancy of Enthousiasme During the last third of the seventeenth century, a crisis gripped the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture: the querelle du coloris. Although by the time Watteau was admitted 320 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 1 Peter Paul Rubens, The Drunken Silenus, 1616–17, oil on canvas, 83½ £ 84½ in. (212 £ 214.5 cm). Alte Pinakothek, Munich (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by BPK, Berlin / Art Resource, NY) to the Royal Academy in 1712 the debate had largely run its course, its outcomes defined the theoretical framework around which the artist worked and, not surprisingly, bear directly on his relationship to reverie. Since Charles Le Brun assumed the reins of the Royal Academy in 1663, painting was understood to have its end not in color, its material base, but in dessein, the principle of design and drawing. Domain of the mind rather than the hand, dessein lifted painting beyond labor and into the realm of reason and thought, asserted its epistemic dignity and its parity with poetry. As the vehicle for narrative (the histoire), it represented the promise of the perfect signifier, of a logic of painterly forms, based in imitation of the visible world, that conformed to language with almost exact congruence.10 For the partisans of dessein, the body stood out as the privileged site onto which words, ideas, and narrative could be mapped and through which they could be read.11 As Nicolas Poussin, the progenitor of this ideal in France, is said to have declared, “just as the twenty-four letters of the alphabet serve to form our speech and express our thoughts, in the same way the lineaments of the human body serve to express the various passions of the soul in order to make visible what one has within the spirit.”12 No sooner had the primacy of dessein been affirmed than dissent began to swell in the ranks of the Royal Academy, reigniting a debate that had been smoldering since the Renaissance.13 Led by the theorist Roger de Piles, the rebel faction turned away from the paragons of the old guard, Raphael and Poussin, and embraced new heroes: Titian, Rembrandt, and, above all, Peter Paul Rubens. They rejected the intellectual definition of painting cherished by the partisans of dessein; rejected the notion that painting’s end lay in narrative or discourse or reason. Instead, insisting on powers unique to painting, they staked the essence of the medium on color and its enthralling, properly visual, effects.14 Painting was only makeup [un fard], they contended, an alluring surface. Its end was seduction, not instruction. Roland Fr# eart de Chambray, an early critic of color, complained that the colorists “have made for themselves a new mistress, coquettish and playful, who asks them only for makeup [fard] and colors in order to please at the first encounter, without worrying if she pleases for very long.”15 Yet it was precisely the erotic dimension of painting, as an object that generated and gratified desire, that they promoted. Color sexualized the canvas, metamorphosed it into a woman to be admired and adored, assured its status as an object beyond the reach of language or reason. Painting, de Piles proclaimed, “must call to its viewers . . . and the surprised spectator must go to her, as if to enter into conversation with figures she represents.”16 It solicited viewers, beckoning them with its physical, even carnal, delights. Powerless to resist, the spectator was meant nothing less than to fall in love.17 At the heart of color’s allure lay its capacity for illusion.18 “We know that painting is only makeup [fard], that its essence is to deceive, and that the greatest deceiver in this art is the greatest painter,” de Piles insisted.19 And color’s greatest deception was its ability to approximate human flesh, to simulate its luster and texture with such art that the line between the physical thing and its representation in paint melted away. The erotic language employed by de Piles and the other colorists thus did not merely establish an analogy between the sensuality of color and that of flesh: the shock of seeing a body enlivened by the trace of the artist’s brush, of seeing skin that seemed somehow grafted onto the canvas provided such a thrill that the spectator could barely resist reaching out to touch it. Rubens, they agreed, was the master of this alchemy. Remarking on the nude woman in the foreground of his Druken Silenus (Fig. 1), de Piles marveled, “The flesh tone [carnation] of this Satyresse, as well as that of her children, is so true [v#e ritables] that one could easily imagine that if one held her hand one would feel the heat of her blood.”20 Rubens fulfilled painting’s potential to gratify desire by allowing the eye to possess and, in a sense, touch the object of its gaze. According to de Piles, the body made its strongest impact within a matrix of compositional effects and a hierarchy of pictorial order, what he called the disposition.21 “No matter how advantageous the subject, how ingenious the invention, how faithful the imitation of the object the painter has chosen, if they are not well distributed,” he stated, “the composition will never satisfy the disinterested spectator, and will never enjoy general approbation.”22 Proper disposition demanded that the painting’s principal figures be grouped in the center of the painting and accentuated with proper light and shade, the peripheries becoming progressively less focused and distinct. This effect de Piles termed the tout ensemble, a “general subordination of objects, one to another, which makes them converge all together [tous ensembles] to make but one.”23 The tout ensemble, de Piles argued, “prevent[s] the eyes from wandering, and fix[es] them agreeably” in the center of the composition, facilitating one of the painter’s chief obligations:24 to seize the attention of the spectator au premier coup d’ oeil, or at first glance, and establish an immediate, sensual rapport with the canvas.25 By WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD imposing harmony and hierarchy on the order of the world, the tout ensemble offered spectators an irresistible simulacrum of lived experience.26 It intensified color’s illusionism and, improving on nature itself, could even “make the painted objects more true . . . than the actual [v#e ritables] ones.”27 Painting could now claim precedence over the real, and de Piles could assert, against the old guard’s arguments for the parity of painting and poetry, that “the other arts only awaken the idea of absent things, but painting stands in for them entirely and makes them present by its essence.”28 Painting did not merely represent an absence but produced presence, its own sensual reality.29 When color’s seductive illusions joined with the tout ensemble’s magnetic harmonies, painting reached the apex of its powers: the production of enthousiasme.30 Enthousiasme, as theorized by de Piles, referred to the state of mind engendered in the spectator by painting’s overall visual and material effect.31 It described an experience of overwhelming power, when painting “transports the mind to a state of admiration mixed with astonishment and ravishes the mind with such violence that it does not have time to reflect.”32 The concept was intimately linked with the sublime and its extraordinary success in France after Nicolas Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s Peri hupsous in 1674, the Trait#e du sublime, ou du merveilleux dans le discours.33 By its nature, the sublime thwarts any attempt to define it, but most commentators of the Grand Si" ecle, Boileau chief among them, agreed that it designated an overwhelming affective response to language. “It ravishes us, it transports us, and produces in us a certain admiration mixed with astonishment and surprise,” Longinus declared.34 It “is that which forms the excellence and sovereign perfection of discourse.”35 Enthousiasme, which has an otherwise long and complicated history, represents de Piles’s attempt to find an equivalent to the sublime, a literary concept, that was proper to painting.36 It shared with the sublime its powers of ecstatic transport, but it derived that power from visual rather than discursive effects, and it was felt immediately.37 By pictorial means alone, it immersed spectators in the painted world, totally and irrationally. If, for the partisans of dessein, painting required reason and erudition, and consequently granted ultimate authority to viewing subjects who held a painting’s hermeneutic key, enthousiasme flattened the field of spectatorship. King and commoner alike could not resist painting’s sensual jolt, a violent attraction that overwhelmed any resistance. “True painting,” de Piles proclaimed, “is that which calls to us (so to speak) by surprising us: and it is only by the force of the effect it produces that we cannot stop ourselves from approaching it.”38 It ensnared the looking subject in the embrace of untold and inexorable pleasure, drawing the eye ineluctably to the center. Watteau’s Reticent Bodies and the Degradation of Illusion When Watteau moved to Paris around 1702, the colorist camp had entrenched itself in both the Royal Academy and the salons of the amateurs. De Piles was named the academy’s conseiller honoraire (honorary adviser) in 1699 and had taken his place as France’s leading art theorist. He published his theoretical summa, the Cours de peinture par principe, in 1708, which went on to become the century’s most influential and republished work of French art theory. Watteau’s style, with 321 its painterly brushwork and warm palette, betrays the unmistakable influence of the colorists’ ascent, and his extensive copying after Titian and especially Rubens indicates the extent to which he must have absorbed de Piles’s lessons. It is likely, in fact, that Watteau knew de Piles and would have discussed painting with him at the salon of their patron, the financier Pierre Crozat, which had come to rival the academy as a hub of artistic debate and innovation.39 The artist’s friendship with the painter Charles de La Fosse (1636–1716), another client of Crozat and the leading colorist of his generation, as well as his increasing involvement with the academy around 1708 would have further exposed him to de Piles’s theories.40 On the face of it, then, Watteau appears to be an exemplary colorist, unproblematically de Pilean—and this, to varying degrees, is how many scholars have portrayed him.41 Yet he departs from de Piles in striking ways. In many of the f e^tes galantes—not all, but a significant number of them—he turns away from the twin poles of the theorist’s system: the illusionistic body and the tout ensemble.42 Watteau’s invitation to reverie must be understood in light of these subversions.43 L’ assembl#e e dans un parc (Fig. 2), one of the finest f e^tes galantes, gives a good idea of the artist’s rejection of the sensual, illusionistic body. The elegant men, women, and children gathered in the park are so small that they occupy only the bottom fifth of the composition. Subsumed by their costumes, they appear, like opalescent fireflies, as patches of brilliant pastels sparkling against the muted tones of the foreground. Rubens’s much larger Garden of Love (Fig. 3), a clear forerunner of the f e^te galante, which Watteau knew and borrowed from frequently,44 could not provide a more vivid contrast. Here, the figures stride onto the scene with vigorous physiques and luminous flesh, barely contained by their frame. Their costumes “make us understand,” to quote de Piles’s remarks on fabric, “what they cover, principally the nude bodies of the figures.”45 Watteau’s painting derives much from Rubens’s: its vivid coloring and energetic brushwork; its composition, with a couple on the left walking toward a larger group of people on the right; even its figures, especially the seated women in yellow on the far right, based on a similarly attired woman in the middle of The Garden of Love. But the robustness of Rubens’s painting is foreign to this world. No one would imagine reaching out expecting to feel the heat of the figures’ blood, as de Piles did in front of Rubens. No one would claim that the artist’s miniature dolls, lost in the folds of glistening silks, pulsate with life and radiate physical presence. Watteau has divested the body of its privileged position as the fulcrum of painting’s supersession of the real, denying the erotic thrill of paint-as-flesh. The artist who devoted so much energy to studying and copying Rubens’s work has turned his master’s model on its head.46 Watteau’s departures from Rubens’s example were not lost on his contemporaries. As the comte de Caylus, the artist’s friend, complained in a 1748 lecture at the Royal Academy, Watteau’s figures “are almost demie nature,” so insubstantial that their corporeality barely registers.47 He went on to declare, “Indeed, having almost no knowledge of anatomy, and having never drawn the nude”—which we know to be patently untrue—“he knew neither how to read it nor how to express it.”48 We should, however, pause before attributing 322 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 2 Jean-Antoine Watteau, L’ assembl#e e dans un parc, ca. 1716–17, oil on panel, 12¾ £ 18¼ in. (32.5 £ 46.5 cm). Mus# ee du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY) 3 Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Love, ca. 1633–34, oil on canvas, 78⅜ £ 113½ in. (199 £ 286 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY) Watteau’s rendering of the body in the f e^tes galantes to incompetence. His works in other genres reveal a different side to the artist. Nymphe et satyre (Fig. 4), for example, exhibits a far greater sense of corporeal presence than anything in the f e^tes galantes. One could name other examples as well, including Diane au bain, La toilette, and Le jugement de P^ a ris, not to mention the scores of allegedly pornographic pictures said to have been destroyed on the artist’s death. Watteau could be a model colorist when he wanted. He could offer the kind of erotic gratification promised by Rubens’s bodies when he chose. But in the f e^tes galantes he holds back. It is telling that when Watteau includes erotic nude figures in these pictures—for example, in Divertissements champ^ e tres (Fig. 5), # e es—they are statues. If Plaisirs d’ amour, or Les Champs-Elys# Rubens deploys this device to accentuate the corporeality of the other figures, with their ruddy coloring and strapping proportions, Watteau seems to use the gray flesh of his statues to compound the “real” figures’ lack of heat and blood and presence. Especially when considering an artist who Caylus also maintained “thought profoundly about painting,” we would do well to consider that Watteau’s mode of rendering the body here was more deliberate than Caylus would have it, that a more knowing subversion of pictorial norms is at work.49 Part of this subversion has to do with Watteau’s insistent revelation of the material support of representation. Where for de Piles the brushstroke served primarily as a vehicle for WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 323 interwoven tonalities and of ribbonlike or featherlike brushstrokes. Satin bows, shifting folds of fabric, textured linen sleeves, and transparent muslin collarettes hover between an existence as things and a quasiexistence as things coming into view.50 4 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Nymphe et satyre, ca. 1715–16, oil on panel, 29 £ 42⅜ in. (73.5 £ 107.5 cm). Mus#ee du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY) tromperie, or trickery, in Watteau the diminishment of the body opens up a space from which the artist’s feathery, gossamer brushstrokes can yield pleasures independent of what they represent. Fabric, in particular, emerges as the privileged site in which painting loses its capacity to supersede reality with illusion. In L’ assembl#e e dans un parc, for instance, before anything else we notice the figures’ shimmering silk costumes, rendered in pale shades of pink, gold, green, and blue. Unlike many of his contemporaries and especially many of the newly fashionable Dutch masters of the previous century (such as Gerard ter Borch), though, Watteau does not represent fabric to dazzle with a highly finished illusionism. Instead, he uses it to draw attention to the artificiality of the representation, to his own trace on the canvas. As Mary Vidal eloquently puts it, Watteau has replaced action and finish with indexical traces of his own artistic process through displays of 5 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Divertissements champ^ e tres, ca. 1719–21, oil on canvas, 50⅛ £ 75½ in. (127.2 £ 191.7 cm). Wallace Collection, London (artwork in the public domain; photograph by kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London) The dialectic between Rubens’s flesh and Watteau’s fabrics lies at the heart of Watteau’s subversions of de Piles’s theories. Created by human hands to conceal, adorn, and civilize the natural body, fabric serves as a synecdoche for the artificiality of the painted world. Where Rubens uses flesh to surpass reality, Watteau uses silk, satin, lace, and muslin to draw attention to the irreality of what he represents, to foreground that, like clothing, painting is the product of the human hand. With fabric’s non fini given priority over the dazzling presence of flesh, the artist compels the spectator to admire not the miracle of mimesis but his skill with the brush. At first glance, Watteau seems here to be in line with colorist doctrine. Rubens, after all, was widely admired for his handling of paint, and for all his emphasis on painting’s capacity to simulate presence, de Piles also appreciated the pleasures of brushwork, what he called the pinceau, to a degree unprecedented in French art theory. “[T]he word pinceau,” he explained, “signifies simply the way in which the painter handled it to apply his colors. And when these same colors are not too agitated, nor too tormented by the movement of a heavy hand, and when, on the contrary, its movement appears free, swift, and light, one says the work exhibits a beautiful pinceau.”51 Watteau’s pinceau, especially in his handling of cloth, exhibits the kind of freedom, swiftness, and lightness appreciated by de Piles. Caylus himself praised Watteau’s “touch, fine and light, [which] gave his execution a piquant and animated air.”52 Nonetheless, de Piles’s admiration for the pinceau came with a caveat. The pleasures of the brushwork and close looking were reserved for connoisseurs, experts in artistic technique, while the principle of illusion, produced by the effect of proper viewing distance, always took precedence: 324 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 Not all paintings are made to be seen from up close or to be held in the hand, and it is enough that they produce their effect from the place where one usually looks at them, except for connoisseurs who, after looking from a reasonable distance, want to come closer to see the artifice. For there is no painting that does not have its proper distance from which it should be seen.53 mind.” He cautioned, “[Dessein] is always the pole and compass that orients us in this study [of painting], so that we are not submerged in the ocean of color, where many drown trying to find refuge.”57 For de Piles, the mediation of the illusionistic body moored color to meaning and intelligibility. The pinceau, he insisted, should always be moelleux, or soft, creating a seamless transition from the softness of the artist’s touch to that of flesh—a transition that allowed the spectator to return easily to the proper distance where illusion regains its power.58 Yet Watteau, without the anchor of flesh, nearly abandons color to its material quiddity, coming perilously close to plunging the spectator into Le Brun’s ocean of non-sense. The brittle, chalky refinement of his pinceau interrupts the transmutation of pigment into flesh. It draws the spectator ever closer and denies any distance at which illusionism can satisfactorily take hold. Le fard fails to fulfill its primary function: to deceive the spectator. None of Watteau’s contemporaries essayed comparable effects, at least not to the same degree. La Fosse, for instance, borrowed almost as frequently from Rubens, yet his paintings, like Bacchus et Ariane (Fig. 6), hew closely to the kind of Rubensian illusionism admired by de Piles. Watteau’s borrowings, by contrast, take the letter but not the spirit of the Baroque master; they amount to a kind of “misprision,” or productive misreading, of the normative interpretation of Rubens.59 Having adopted the stylistic idioms of the Flemish painter and other colorists, Watteau invites the spectator into a sensual face-to-face encounter with the canvas only to deny the gratification of desire. Eroticism is evoked in the amorous couples flirting in Arcadian landscapes, but the insistent incompleteness of Watteau’s pinceau precludes erotic recognition or identification. Hermeneutic closure, equivalent in colorist theory with erotic closure, is thus withheld: reducible neither to fully present flesh nor the brute materiality of pigment, Watteau’s trace represents only the condition of halfeffaced presence itself, installing a small but unbreachable distance between painting and beholder. For the artist’s contemporaries, the experience of looking could no longer be defined by ineluctable seduction. Watteau had chipped away at painting’s dominion over the eye. The viewer who wishes to participate in the game of illusion that is painting’s charge must play by the game’s rules. If he comes close to admire the pinceau, “he must,” as Jacqueline Lichtenstein observes, “immediately move away, or else watch his pleasure, which he knows to be fragile, dissipate.”54 Painting, seen from the point where flesh dissolves into pigment, loses its properly visual powers and pleasures, loses its potential for tromperie.55 It lays bare what Georges Didi-Huberman calls the “aporia of the detail,” the moment when the materiality of the painter’s mark exposes itself to the spectator’s eye and disrupts the semiotic coherence of the image, when “the up-close gaze manages only to unravel matter and form, and, doing this, despite itself, it condemns itself to a veritable tyranny of matter.”56 The “tyranny of matter,” the latent nonmeaning in painting’s material base, in fact weighed heavily on color’s critics. “One could say,” Le Brun asserted, “that color is entirely dependent on matter, and, as a consequence, that it is less noble than dessein, which pertains only to the The Center Cannot Hold: Watteau’s Subversions of the Tout Ensemble In his Cours de peinture par principe, de Piles advances two metaphors for the tout ensemble : a convex mirror and a bunch of grapes. A convex mirror, he writes, “improves on nature in the unity of the object in vision,” by highlighting the objects in its center and diminishing the visibility of the objects at its periphery.60 Le repos de Diane (Fig. 7) by de Piles’s friend Antoine Coypel (1661–1722), named director of the Royal Academy in 1714 and First Painter to the King in 1716, gives a textbook example.61 Arranged in a semicircle, a group of figures is gathered in the center of the painting. The light recedes toward the peripheries of the composition and the handling becomes more finished toward the middle, so that the eye is drawn to Diana’s pearly flesh.62 De Piles’s bunch of grapes functions similarly, but it demonstrates more precisely how to coordinate multifigured compositions (Fig. 8). No doubt he had in mind something like Rubens’s Garden of 6 Charles de La Fosse, Bacchus et Ariane, 1699, oil on canvas, 95¼ £ 72⅞ in. (242 £ 185 cm). Mus#ee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon (artwork in the public domain; photograph ! RMN-Grand Palais, provided by Art Resource, NY) WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 325 7 Antoine Coypel, Le repos de Diane, oil on canvas, ca. 1695, 35⅜ £ 48 in. (90 £ 122 cm). Mus#ee D#epartemental d’Art # Ancien et Contemporain, Epinal, France (artwork in the public domain; photograph ! RMN-Grand Palais, provided by Art Resource, NY) Love (Fig. 3), where each figure, carefully delineated by light and shade and compressed together, creates an almost solid mass in the middle of the composition. De Piles’s chief concern, in drawing on the imagery of the convex mirror and the bunch of grapes, is to focus attention, because “in order to please the eye, we must fix it with a dominant group, which, by the reposes caused by its lights and shades, does not hinder the effect of other groups, or subordinate objects.”63 Therefore, along with a bunch of grapes, de Piles produces a collection of scattered grapes to show what happens when the tout ensemble is not observed. “If . . . you separate your figures,” he warns, your eyes will suffer for seeing them dispersed all together, or each of them individually; all together because the visual rays are multiplied by the multiplicity of objects; each individually because if you want to look at one, all those around it will strike and attract your view, which causes it great pain in this sort of separation and diversity of objects.64 Dispersing objects divides attention and makes the eye restless; it can even cause pain. The tout ensemble could ensure painting’s power to attract au premier coup d’ oeil, to endow painting with the visual unity that could hold the gaze in rapt attention. Watteau, however, offers something different. In a number of the f e^tes galantes, especially those with many figures, he shows a remarkable willingness to break away from de Piles’s model and experiment with new compositional arrangements. In paintings like Divertissements champ^ e tres (Fig. 5) and R#e union en plein air, for example, the figures are strewn about the canvas like scattered grapes, with no strong unifying scheme to organize the composition. And even when there are figures highlighted in the center, as in Les plaisirs du bal, their visual interest is often diminished by figures around 8 Roger de Piles, bunch of grapes (above) and dispersed grapes (below), from Cours de peinture par principe, Paris, 1708, figs. 3, 4, etching and engraving. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Typ 715.08.693 (artwork in the public domain) them. Sometimes the artist goes further still: he inverts the tout ensemble, turning de Piles’s convex mirror inside out and pushing the figures around the peripheries of the composition. Le rendez-vous de chasse (Fig. 9) is a case in point. Here the trees clear in the middle of the painting, bending and 326 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 9 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Le rendez-vous de chasse, ca. 1717–18, oil on canvas, 49 £ 74⅜ in. (124.5 £ 189 cm). Wallace Collection, London (artwork in the public domain; photograph by kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London) 10 Nicolas Lancret, Repos de chasse, ca. 1735–40, oil on canvas, 24¼ £ 29½ in. (61.5 £ 74.8 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) curving to frame an airy void of sky. The composition remains circular, and clair-obscur concentrates light in the middle, but the painting’s forms are distributed around an empty center. If Watteau had followed de Piles’s precepts, he might have painted something like Repos de chasse (Fig. 10), a similarly themed work by his follower Nicolas Lancret, with its tightly compressed composition that culminates in three central figures sitting underneath a large tree. Instead, he has conceived a composition that breaks apart the pull of the tout ensemble, drawing the eye to the painting’s other elements—to the women’s shimmering yellow, blue, and pink garments, to the horses, and up to the delicate foliage of the trees. He does something similar in L’ assembl#ee dans un parc (Fig. 2), where the clearing of trees invites the eye to circle from the couple standing on the left, upward to the trees as they arch around the clearing, and down toward the figures on the right, drawing the gaze to the brilliant patches of color that dot the foreground. Likewise, in Assembl#e e pr"e s de la fontaine de Neptune (Fig. 11) and F^ e te champ^ e tre (Fig. 12), the luminous glades on the left and the striking figures at their margins, swept up in the circular thrust of the gracefully curving branches around them, generate similar competing centers of attention. In all of these examples, Watteau mobilizes landscape and figure to contravene, with remarkable boldness, the guiding logic of the tout ensemble.65 Rejecting de Piles’s imperative to fix the eye, he sets it in motion.66 Watteau’s violation of the tout ensemble is nowhere more striking than in the most ambitious of his f e^tes galantes: the two versions of Le p"e lerinage a" l’^ı le de Cyth"e re. In the version in the Mus# ee du Louvre, Paris (Fig. 13), his reception piece for the Royal Academy, a serpentine ribbon of lovers and putti wraps around a vaporous nowhere of water and mountains and sky. The landscape alludes to the late Titian, but if Titian’s landscapes typically provide a compositional foil for a Venus or Diana or some other erotic spectacle, Watteau’s landscape is conspicuous for its lack of alluring flesh— indeed, it is the most expansive and exquisite of his empty spaces. Without a figure to anchor the center of the composition, the eye circles around the painting’s peripheries, descending from the tree on the right, through to the parade of lovers boarding the ship, up to the riotous putti above and back to the tree—and from there, repeating its route or perhaps reversing course. In the second version (Fig. 14), Watteau endowed the composition with an even greater sense of circularity and movement.67 The branches of the tree on the right, for example, now bend toward the figures on the left; the putti have experienced a population explosion, extending the line of figures upward like the jet of a fountain; and the ship sports a towering mast, reinforcing the upward thrust of the putti’s flight and leading the eye back to the tree. The pilgrims, too, are more individuated, conspicuous, and numerous than before. Scattered, like an exploded firework, across the canvas in vibrant pinks, yellows, and blues, WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 327 11 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Assembl#e e pr"e s de la fontaine de Neptune, ca. 1712–13, oil on canvas, 18⅝ £ 22⅜ in. (47.3 £ 56.9 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid (artwork in the public domain; photograph ! Museo Nacional del Prado / Art Resource, New York) 12 Jean-Antoine Watteau, F^ e te champ^ e tre, 1718–21, oil on panel, 19⅛ £ 25⅜ in. (48.6 £ 64.5 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago (artwork in the public domain; photograph ! Art Institute of Chicago) they coax the eye to caress the peripheries of the canvas as it passes from one lover to the next. Just to the left of the center, the ethereal mountains and the autumnal haze that surrounds them in the first version have been minimized; now there is only the pale blue of sky to set off the pyrotechnics around it. There has been a long-standing debate about whether the lovers are departing for or from Cythera, whether we are witnessing the awakening of desire or its demise.68 The compositional structures of the two paintings give credence to the idea, advanced by a number of scholars, that they accommodate both narratives, that they are inherently ambiguous.69 In a striking convergence of form and message, the sequence of figures suggests narrative progression, yet without the unity of the tout ensemble to focus the eye and to order the figures hierarchically, the paintings impede our efforts to read them linearly or to allow the eye to rest at a point where the action would culminate. With narrative 328 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 13 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Le p"e lerinage a" l’^ı le de Cyth"e re, ca. 1717, oil on canvas, 50¾ £ 76⅜ in. (129 £ 194 cm). Mus#ee du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Scala, provided by Art Resource, NY) closure forestalled formally, the spectator’s experience of the paintings becomes a gloss on their subject, and the cycle of love is revealed to be incomplete, open-ended. The pilgrims could be at the beginning or the end of their journey, either in a state of anticipation for pleasure forthcoming or nostalgia for pleasure already attained— but they are clearly not, as are Rubens’s lovers in the Garden of Love, in the thrall of pleasure’s eternal present, blissfully unconscious of time’s progress. In the spectator’s restless gaze, they are set in a perpetual dance, forever wavering between their longing for the past or the future.70 Their destination—the consummation of love, the satisfaction of desire—remains out of reach. In an important sense, Cythera, Venus’s island of plenary pleasures, is out of reach for the spectator as well. De Piles’s system promised the attainment of Cythera: enthousiasme, the acme of painting’s powers, could transport the spectator to a state of boundless sensual gratification. But by repudiating color’s illusionism and the tout ensemble’s magnetic harmonies, by refusing to fix the eye at the center of the composition, Watteau blocks its emergence. The result is an absence installed at the heart of representation: the eye wanders in search of the object of its desire only to find it just out of reach, the ecstatic hallucination of flesh and presence refused. In its place, Watteau presents a different encounter with the painted world, one founded on the eye’s freedom to wander and range and roam. Cyth"e re’s pilgrims may be denied their destination, but they herald a new order of visual pleasure. Galanterie and Reverie Watteau’s rejection of enthousiasme and his search for new, more insinuating pictorial effects must be understood in relation to the larger cultural phenomenon of galanterie. Today, we tend to think of galanterie almost exclusively in connection with the subject matter of Watteau’s f e^tes galantes—the elegant and amorous encounters of aristocrats in Arcadian parklands—or else with a more general code of romantic conduct defined by aristocratic values. However, galanterie reached further. It was, as Alain Viala has argued recently, a major cultural current of the Grand Si" ecle, an ethic and aesthetic that defined key aspects of art, literature, and society in the period. Inherently irreconcilable with doctrine, galanterie resists easy characterization, but above all it promoted an ideal based on refinement, variety, and a desire to please in which the cold dominion of reason and the fiery excesses of the passions alike were rejected in favor of playing and douceur, which encompasses the notions of softness, gentleness, and sweetness.71 It was a courtly aesthetic, and women were its chief arbiters and protagonists. For Viala, Watteau puts forward one of the purest and most fully realized expressions of galanterie. The artist, he writes, “seems to have synthesized an entire swath of the expansion of galanterie by introducing it into a new space, pictorial art, where the WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 329 14 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Le p"e lerinage a" l’^ı le de Cyth"e re, ca. 1718–19, oil on canvas, 50¾ £ 76⅜ in. (129 £ 194 cm). Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY) douceur of the poses and colors envelop the uneasiness of enigma.”72 Scholars have previously drawn on galanterie, and the closely related phenomenon of h^o nnet#e , to explore the f e^tes galantes’ imbrication in aristocratic sociability and values, as well as their relation to the actual f e^tes galantes held at Versailles and other courts in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.73 Viala’s expanded conception of the term goes further, inviting us to understand Watteau’s pictorial effects in relation to a larger field of aesthetic debates.74 I am thinking in particular of the galant reaction to Boileau’s translation of Longinus’s Trait#e du sublime, the key source for de Piles’s enthousiasme, and the querelle du sublime that ensued. Like Boileau and de Piles, galant theorists and writers were fascinated by the ineffable, ruptures in the regime of logos that spawned insights and sentiments beyond reason’s compass. Yet they rejected the sublime’s aesthetic of ravishment, denouncing the pleasures of surprise, of attraction au premier coup d’ oeil, dear to de Piles, as false pleasures.75 “Such brilliant [rayonnante] beauty is almost always false,” the Chevalier de M# er# e, among the most prominent of these writers, maintained, “and what makes one lose one’s taste for it in the long run, even though one is taken in at first . . . is chiefly that it occupies one too much and one never wants to be dazzled [#e bloui] for long.”76 Along somewhat different lines but aiming, essentially, at the same target, the Jesuit critic Dominique Bouhours asserted (unexpectedly echoing Fr# eart de Chambray) that some things “have . . . a premier coup d’ oeil that flatters and pleases, but when one looks at them up close, one finds that they are beauties painted with makeup [beaut#e s fard#e es], which dazzle only at the first view.”77 What the galants demanded instead was something more subtle, more insinuating. Defending the charms of the petit go^ u t, or “little taste,” over the grand style of tragedy, they championed effects that pleased rather than ravished.78 To describe these kinds of effects, a battery of terms was devised, and the most important among these included the je ne sais quoi, gr^ a ce, charme, and d#e licatesse.79 All conveyed, to one extent or another, the goal to insinuate rather than a ce, and charme force,80 but as concepts, the je ne sais quoi, gr^ predate the publication of Longinus-Boileau’s Trait#e du sublime and accommodated a variety of effects, notoriously ambiguous and not always easy to distinguish from the sublime.81 D#e licatesse, on the other hand, arose as an explicit alternative to the sublime’s violence, even as a critique of it.82 Theorized by Bouhours in his treatise La mani"e re de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’ esprit of 1687, d#e licatesse epitomized the galant aesthetic of gentle insinuation. For Bouhours, the sublime, “that which transports and ravishes,” might be appropriate for tragedy or epic poetry, but the smaller-scale productions of the galants called for a different kind of effect, for “nothing is less reasonable than to have sublime thoughts in a petit sujet.”83 In contrast to the sublime, things that 330 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 possess d#e licatesse “are difficult to see in one glance [d’ un coup d’ oeil], and, because they are subtle, escape us when we think we are holding them. All one can do is to look at them from up close and at different times, in order to manage to get to know them little by little.”84 Exchanging the sublime’s immediacy for an almost imperceptible attraction, its ravishment for subtle, even fleeting charms, d#e licatesse captures, in period-specific language, the pictorial effects generated by Watteau’s repudiation of enthousiasme in the petit sujet of the f e^te galante. It should come as no surprise, then, that Bouhours criticized Rubens for his lack of d#e licatesse. “Even though [Rubens] endowed everything he did with vivacity and nobility, his figures were more coarse than delicate,” he complained.85 Watteau, on the other hand, with his subtlety, his refusal to dazzle at first glance, could not provide a more fitting example. Lacking the seductive pull of illusionistic bodies or the tout ensemble, the f e^tes galantes require unhurried looking—sometimes up close to admire the pinceau, sometimes further back to follow the curving line of figures around the composition—to enter their world. D#e licatesse, however, does not provide an entirely satisfactory alternative to enthousiasme. Unlike enthousiasme, it registers only a quality of an object or thought and as a result does not capture the experience of looking at the f e^tes galantes— the optical restlessness they elicit or the mental states engendered by that restlessness. Reverie, in ways previously unexplored, can help us to understand that experience. The almost reflexive frequency with which the term is employed in the Watteau literature has, unfortunately, caused us to lose sight of its historical specificity. Nonetheless, reverie’s current meaning—the Dictionnaire de l’ Acad#e mie of 1694 defines it as “thought in which the imagination is allowed to wander”—had taken hold only shortly before Watteau was painting.86 Indeed, as one scholar has suggested recently, reverie was an “invention” of the Grand Si" ecle, the articulation of a new mode of thought and feeling that came to occupy a central place in the period’s cultural imagination.87 Encapsulating the subtle, irrational, d#e licat charms of reflection and meditation, reverie was a galant experience par excellence, a kind of counter-enthousiasme, and became an object of particular interest and prestige in galant circles.88 In her novel Cl#e lie, Madeleine de Scud# ery, the Grand Si" ecle’s great champion of reverie, affirmed that reverie “belongs to those with a tender heart” and that, in order to enter into reverie, “you must have something in your soul that does not displease.”89 Fittingly, for the galant homme it was indispensable: “Three things make a wise [savant] and clever [habile] man: reading, conversation, and reverie,” the Chevalier de M# er# e asserted. “The first enhances his memory; the second polishes his mind; and the last forms his judgment.”90 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, as galanterie spread beyond the rarefied world of the high nobility, reverie gained increasing appeal in artistic circles, despite the dominance of de Piles’s aesthetic of ravishment.91 In fact, as director of the Royal Academy, Antoine Coypel promoted reverie as a vital element of aesthetic experience. In a lecture delivered to the academy in 1720 entitled “Sur l’excellence de la peinture,” he explained that painting, like poetry, can put the mind “in a sweet state of reverie and reflection,” that both arts can “carry the soul, according to the images which they present to it, not only to joy and hope and all the most lovable passions; but turning the soul also to a moment of sadness, they make it find in its languor a je ne sais quoi which occupies it agreeably.”92 He continued, “I heard a man, celebrated equally in the sciences and the arts, say while he was standing before a painting which he was looking at attentively: ‘it must be very beautiful, because it makes me dream [r^ e ver] and dream agreeably.’”93 Watteau’s paintings in particular lent themselves to this kind of reflection, and it is not improbable that Coypel, who admired the artist’s work, had Watteau in mind in the first place.94 Too small, as a rule, to be viewed comfortably by more than one person, the f e^tes galantes were created not for the grand galleries of a palace but for enjoyment in the private spaces of a cabinet or boudoir.95 They invited close looking, pleasure in the inspection of each trace of the artist’s brush, and are thus linked with the rise of a new kind of spectator: the amateur.96 Coypel affirmed that these “people of intelligence and sentiment . . . judge only with natural taste” and are “touched by the beauty of ideas, by fine and ingenious thoughts, by variety and propriety [biens#e ances].”97 The amateur did not require erudition, only the galant homme’s judgment based on native sentiment and emotion.98 The amateur could enjoy in painting something more subtle than the sensual violence promoted by de Piles, “a variety of pleasure gentler and sweeter [esp"e ce de volupt#e plus douce], for those who are capable of feeling it, than the agitated, tumultuous transports, always tiring and often dangerous, which those who love the clamor of the world call true pleasures.”99 More than any of his contemporaries, Watteau established painting as a site for this kind of pleasure, for reverie. It hardly needs saying that the artist depicted figures lost in reverie with remarkable frequency—we need only think, among many others, of Mezzetin’s dreamy gaze as he strums his guitar (Fig. 15), or l’ amante inqui"e te’s distracted absorption as she tugs at her dress, or, most famously, Pierrot’s enigmatic withdrawal contrasted against the fatuous looks of the other actors and the ass at his feet. Watteau’s favored settings were, moreover, the Arcadian parks and overgrown gardens that served, in the novels of Scud# ery and the poetry of Jean de La Fontaine and many other works of the period, as the privileged territory of reverie.100 Even the artist’s subjects, elegant and idealized, with their enigmatic gestures, fantastic costumes, and amorous attitudes, are the stuff of a lover’s daydream. This is all well-trodden ground. The f e^tes galantes I am discussing did something more: they induced reverie in their viewers through their forms. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, r^ e verie—and the verb from which it comes, r^ e ver—carried a different set of meanings than they did by the end of the century. Fr# ed# eric Godefroy’s Dictionnaire de l’ ancienne langue franç aise, for instance, defines resver [r^ e ver] as: 1) “to go here and there, to roam, to go on a joyful promenade” and 2) “to be delirious [d#e lirer].”101 As the century progressed, the implications of madness in r^ e ver fell away, but r^ e verie and r^ e ver retained the connotation of errancy in the original meaning of r^ e ver, moving from a sense of physical to mental wandering.102 It is this dimension of wandering that makes reverie key for understanding the experience of looking at Watteau’s f e^tes WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD galantes and the roaming gaze generated by their formal maneuvers. The open compositions of the paintings set the eye in motion and their fluttery brushstrokes keep it moving, activating the spectator’s imagination through their refusal to deliver the immediate gratifications of paint-as-flesh.103 The eye wanders the canvas, and the mind, freed from the intense absorption demanded by de Piles, is allowed to wander as well. De Piles himself captured this spirit of aimless travel when he complained that artists who do not foreground their figure principale “are precisely like those who, while telling a story, embark imprudently on a digression so long that they are obliged to finish there, and to conclude with an entirely other thing than their subject.”104 The f e^tes galantes encouraged digression, looking without predetermined end. In the place of formal and narrative closure, they substituted the pleasures of open-endedness and imagination.105 All of this is to suggest that, to a certain extent, Watteau’s formal experiments granted viewers access to the pastoral dreamscapes he depicts. “You must be capable of putting your senses to sleep so that you believe that you are almost dreaming [songer] about the things you are thinking about” to enter into reverie, and “your eyes should not be able to see the diversity of objects distinctly,” Scud# ery maintained.106 The parallel with de Piles’s warning about what happens when the tout ensemble is not observed is striking: “If one presents to the gaze several objects separated and equally sensible, it is certain that the eye, not being able to gather all these objects together, will have trouble focusing [se d#e terminer].”107 The f e^tes galantes produced the lack of focus—and with it, the return to one’s own thoughts and emotions—that feeds reverie. They forged an experience defined not by hallucinatory presence and the raptures of enthousiasme but by the almost distracted engagement of a daydream, encouraging spectators to move continually between the world of the painting and their imaginations in a way that heightened both. Huyghe’s remark that Watteau’s paintings were meant to be dreamed turns out to be more accurate than even he would have realized. A new kind of encounter with painting, and a new kind of spectator, had emerged. The Painting of Modern Selfhood: Reverie and Interiority The advent of this new encounter links Watteau’s enterprise with the emergence, as historians have characterized it, of modern selfhood and interiority in the early modern period, particularly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.108 As we have seen, until the beginning of the seventeenth century, reverie was defined as a state of delirium, a kind of madness. Specifically, it was understood as a pathology brought about by an imbalance of the body’s four humors, or what was then called melancholy.109 In the Dictionnaire de la langue franç aise du 16e si"e cle, for instance, Edmond Huguet cites the following example by Jacques Amyot: “The burning fevers that increase inflammation to the point of putting the man in a reverie and making him lose his understanding.”110 Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, new meanings arose. Reverie maintained its connection with melancholy, but both terms lost their medical baggage. They became instead sources of pleasure, of self-understanding. As Antoine Fureti" ere wrote in his Dictionnaire of 1690, melancholy, in addition to its older meanings, “signifies . . . an agreeable reverie, a pleasure that 331 15 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Mezzetin, ca. 1718–20, oil on canvas, 21¾ £ 17 in. (55.2 £ 43.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (artwork in the public domain; photograph ! The Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY) one finds in solitude, for meditation, for dreaming [songer] about one’s affairs, one’s pleasures, or one’s displeasures.”111 Scud# ery’s praise for the isolated corners of the Ch^ateau de Versailles’s gardens, pastoral landscapes not unlike Watteau’s, as “fitting, to say the least, for a melancholy lover’s solitude and reverie” exemplifies this new attitude.112 Reverie carved out, for the first time in a secular context, a designated space for retreat into the self, where, alone in the seclusion of a cabinet or in nature, one could be absorbed in one’s thoughts and sentiments and fantasies. It defined a refuge for self-discovery where dreamers could explore new modalities of feeling—subtle, ineffable, pleasurable. If the galant ideals of civility defined a distinctly modern relationship between self and other, reverie helped define a distinctly modern relationship of the self to its inner life.113 The special mode of looking elicited by Watteau’s f e^tes galantes bound them, more than any other paintings of their time, to this newly instituted form of interiority; designated them a site of a late, remarkable flowering of one of the great passions of the Grand Si" ecle. In Watteau, the distance established between spectator and painting by the artist’s degradation of enthousiasme and denial of erotic closure opened up a new sphere of subjective experience, a kind of interiorized mode of viewing. It freed spectators, in their ocular errancy, to let their minds wander away from the picture, to allow the experience of looking to take them not back to the painting but inward, to the self. 332 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 16 Jean-Antoine Watteau, La perspective, ca. 1715, oil on canvas, 18⅜ £ 21¾ (46.7 £ 55.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (artwork in the public domain; photograph ! 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) Watteau’s La perspective (Fig. 16), painted about 1715, the year of Louis XIV’s death, throws the ideological consequences of this development into relief. With its amorous aristocrats and pastoral setting, the work is in many ways typical of the f e^te galante, but it is unique in that it depicts an identifiable site: the Ch^ateau de Montmorency, country residence of the artist’s patron, Pierre Crozat.114 The location is revealed by the double loggia at the center of the painting, which stood at the end of a reflecting pond in the ch^ateau’s park. The loggia, though, is no ordinary architectural folly; rather, it is the former country house of Charles Le Brun, which Crozat acquired in 1704 and soon after had gutted and reconfigured as an open-air maison de plaisance.115 Despite its new owner, the site’s association with Le Brun endured. An etching by Caylus of Watteau’s drawing of the loggia even identifies the subject not as Crozat’s garden but as the “House of M. Le Brun, F. P. of King L. XIV” (Fig. 17). In an age when the ch^ateau was inextricable from an individual’s larger personal and social identity, the loggia’s metonymic relation to Le Brun could not easily be effaced. Could Watteau’s invocation of Le Brun here have been a coincidence? Perhaps, but its evocative potential, as a kind of metaphor for his larger project, is too great to ignore. Typically, Watteau has structured the composition around a void of sky. And here, in the only recognizable site in all the f e^tes galantes, the artist has chosen to summon up the ghost of the recently deceased First Painter to the King, the Grand Si"ecle’s most illustrious painter. It is tempting to think that the sophisticated artists and amateurs who frequented Crozat’s salon, part of a new Parisian elite that defined itself against Versailles and the court, would have appreciated the gesture: in the hollowed-out ruins of his house, Le Brun’s obsolescence has been exposed for all to see. We cannot help but recall the “entombment” of Louis XIV’s portrait in L’ enseigne de Gersaint, which has been interpreted as a vanitas emblem of the impermanence of earthly glory.116 Memorial to a bygone order, Le Brun’s gutted ch^ateau, too, is an emblem of impermanence; it is the trace of Death in the kingdom of Eros. Yet how different this memento mori is from its predecessors! In the greatest vanitas painting of the previous century, Poussin’s Bergers d’ Arcadie (Fig. 18), for example, Death takes center stage, and each figure freezes in contemplation of its inescapable presence—de Piles, despite his censure of Poussin’s deficiencies in color, would have approved.117 In La perspective, by contrast, Death’s monument is only dimly perceptible in the background. Shielded by a curtain of trees, the lovers and children disport themselves in the foreground, blissfully unaware of the structure’s presence; only the smaller couple in the middle of the painting, stooped with age and already acquainted with the transience of youth and love, turn to confront it. In this new order of pleasure and galanterie, Death no longer casts its pall over the proceedings. The stakes of Watteau’s formal experiments are now coming into focus. As the composition’s structural heart, the hollowed-out ch^ateau represents, in this new perspective, a rejection of de Piles’s system and the model of authority it embodied. Le Brun here is a figure not just of artistic or political authority narrowly defined, as Katie Scott has argued in her provocative reading of the painting, but of a more encompassing authority over the self and its experience—of the authority of painting.118 It is no coincidence that de Piles adopted political metaphors to explain his theory of composition, describing “the principal figure in a painting” as “a king among his courtiers, whom one must recognize at first glance [au premier coup d’ oeil], and who must outshine all those who accompany him,” and the tout ensemble as a “tout politique, where the great need the small, as the small need WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 333 18 Nicolas Poussin, Les bergers d’ Arcadie, ca. 1650, oil on canvas, 33½ £ 47⅝ in. (85 £ 121 cm). Mus# ee du Louvre, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY) 17 Comte de Caylus, after a drawing by Jean-Antoine Watteau, Maison de M. Le Brun, etching. Biblioth"eque Nationale de France, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Biblioth"eque Nationale de France) the great.”119 At its heart, his system aimed to establish painting’s absolute sovereignty over the looking subject. Painting, he exclaimed, should permit “no one to pass indifferently . . . without being surprised, without stopping, and without enjoying [jouir] for some time the pleasure of his surprise.”120 The experience of viewing was always dependent on, and determined by, the overwhelming power of the exterior object, an object that continually asserted its mastery over the spectator. Enthousiasme represented the apogee of this mastery, for its violence impeded subjective liberty; impeded the freedom to look and react according to the caprices of one’s feeling and judgment. “Before examining any detail,” de Piles affirmed, “[the spectator] finds himself transported all of a sudden and without his consent [malgr#e lui] to the degree of enthousiasme to which the painter has brought him.”121 If enthousiasme’s power depended on a fascinating and irresistible center, in La perspective that center has been hollowed out—and now, ironically, bespeaks only its inability to impose unity and hierarchy on the image. Le Brun, the king, is dead, and on the ruins of his ch^ateau the freedom of the spectator is staked out. As the vehicle for the liberation of the painting’s compositional architecture, the gutted structure becomes a cipher for the collapse of reality into dream and the ascent of subjective experience. With his formal innovations, the artist upended painting’s sovereignty and instituted a new, self-determining order of vision in which eye and mind are encouraged to roam—the order of reverie. Spectatorship emerged as an intimate, private encounter with the canvas, grounded in the pleasures of instability, indeterminacy, restlessness. Where de Piles’s model of pictorial effects obliterated the self in the stupefaction of enthousiasme, Watteau’s pictorial effects allowed for the formation of a new kind of viewing subject. By inviting his contemporaries to dream, Watteau marked out his achievement as a painter of modern interiority: for the first time in French painting, looking became a means of establishing the autonomy of the self. Aaron Wile, a specialist in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French art, is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. His dissertation, entitled “Painting, Authority, and Experience at the Twilight of the Grand Si"e cle, 1690–1721,” focuses on La Fosse, Jouvenet, A. Coypel, and Watteau [Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, Mass. 02138, awile@fas.harvard.edu]. Notes This essay began as a Qualifying Paper written at Harvard University under the direction of Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Sylvaine Guyot, and Henri Zerner. My deepest gratitude goes to Professors Lajer-Burcharth, Guyot, and Zerner for their encouragement and feedback throughout the writing of this paper, from its earliest stages through its later versions. I am also indebted to several friends and colleagues who offered generous and insightful comments along the way: David Pullins, Trevor Stark, Elizabeth Petcu, Oliver Wunsch, Daniel Zolli, Adam Jasienski, and Catherine Girard. Finally, I wish to thank The Art Bulletin’s two anonymous readers, as well as manuscript editor Lory Frankel, for suggestions that greatly improved the final version of this essay. Any remaining faults are my own—as are translations, unless otherwise noted. 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts (1835), vol. 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 806. 2. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 9. 3. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, “Watteau” (1860), in French XVIII Century Painters, trans. Robin Ironside (New York: Phaidon, 1948), 6. 334 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 4. Ren# e Huyghe, L’ univers de Watteau (Paris: H. Scr#epel, 1969), 36. 5. Donald Posner, Antoine Watteau (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 181. 6. Norman Bryson, “Watteau and Reverie,” in Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien R#e gime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 69–58. 7. See Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Thomas Crow, “The Critique of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Art,” Art Criticism 3, no. 1 (1986): 17–31; and Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Bryson, Word and Image, 59, acknowledges his neglect of the querelle du coloris, writing that “there is an important sense in which the quarrel is . . . irrelevant to the issue of discursivity or figurality of the image.” He is, strictly speaking, correct, but that does not mean that the querelle is in turn irrelevant to some of the other issues raised by Watteau’s paintings. 8. The f e^te galante did not crystallize into a recognized genre until decades after Watteau’s death, and only later was he credited with its invention. In fact, Christian Michel has shown that Watteau was received into the Royal Academy with the same rank as a history painter, which enhances our understanding of how ambitious his project in fact was. What we call the f e^tes galantes today, however, form a cohesive group within the artist’s body of work, and so I use the term to designate paintings that fall within this group. See Michel, Le “ c#e l"e bre Watteau” (Geneva: Droz, 2008), 165–88; and Martin Eidelberg, “Watteau, peintre des f e^tes gal# antes,” in Watteau et la f e^te galante (Paris: Editions de la R# eunion des Mus# ees Nationaux, 2004), 17–27. 9. We should keep in mind, as Pierre Rosenberg reminds us, that Watteau’s art has profound roots in the culture of the Sun King’s France. See Rosenberg, “Watteau, Peintre de Louis XIV,” in Sun King: The Ascendancy of French Culture during the Reign of Louis XIV, ed. David L. Rubin (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992), 144–52. of painting’s surprising, properly visual effects, which are independent of subject matter. 26. Ren# e D# emoris, “De la v# erit# e en peinture chez F# elibien et Roger de Piles: Imitation, repr# esentation, illusion,” in “La naissance de la th# eorie de l’art en France, 1640–1720,” ed. Stefan Germer and Christian Michel, special issue, Revue d’ Esth#e tique 31–32 (1997): 47–50. 27. De Piles, Dialogue sur le coloris, 60. The status of truth in de Piles is complex. De Piles, as Lichtenstein writes (The Eloquence of Color, 179), “separates the problem of pictorial truth from the metaphysical question of how representation relates to truth. . . . In painting, the concept of truth refers only to the relation between the viewer and the painting that is its sole reference. Piles is not judging the representation of a reality but the reality of a representation—that is, the effectiveness of an illusion.” For further discussion, see Lichtenstein, 169–95; and Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 272–73. 28. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 33. See Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 178; and Louis Marin, “Representation and Simulacrum,” in On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 316. 29. Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 178–79. 30. On enthousiasme in de Piles, see Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art, 106–24; and idem, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 276–77. 31. Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art, 120. Enthousiasme begins as the artist’s state of mind in the midst of creation, his fureur pittoresque, or his picturesque frenzy, which is then transferred to the spectator by painting’s pictorial effects. 32. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 107. 33. Peri hupsous was long attributed to Longinus, but in fact its author is unknown. Today the author is known as Pseudo-Longinus, but for the sake of brevity, and in keeping with seventeenth-century usage, I refer to the author as Longinus. 13. On the querelle, see Bernard Teyss"edre, Roger de Piles et les d#e bats sur le coloris au si"e cle de Louis XIV (Paris: La Biblioth"eque des Arts, 1957). 34. Longinus, Trait#e du sublime, trans. Nicolas Boileau (1674, ed. of 1701), ed. Francis Goyet (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1993), 74. The literature on the sublime in seventeenth-century France is immense. Th# eodore A. Litman, Le sublime en France, 1660–1714 (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1971), is the classic study but in some respects dated. More recent treatments, which address the problematic approach of Litman’s work and have greatly enriched our understanding of the sublime’s central place in seventeenth-century French literature, include Sophie Hache, La langue du ciel: Le sublime en France au XVIIe si"e cle (Paris: Honor# e Champion, 2000); Lawrence Kerslake, Essays on the Sublime: Analyses of French Writings on the Sublime from Boileau to La Harpe (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000); Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, Va.: Rockwood Press, 2003); and Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2006). De Piles, it should be remarked, borrows much of Longinus-Boileau’s language in his definition of enthousiasme. 14. See Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 117–95; Crow, “The Critique of Enlightenment”; Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art; and Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 83–84. My account of colorist theory here is particularly indebted to the work of Puttfarken and Lichtenstein. 36. On later understandings of enthousiasme in the mid-eighteenth century, particularly with respect to creative enthousiasme, see Mary Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15–41. 10. On the principles of dessein, see Charles Le Brun, “Sentiments sur le discours du m# erite de la couleur par M. Blanchard,” in Les conf#e rences de l’ Acad#e mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture au XVIIe si"e cle, ed. Alain M# erot (Paris: ENSBA, 1996), 228–33. 11. On the relation of Watteau’s paintings to this model, see Bryson, Word and Image, 29–88. 12. Quoted in Andr#e F#elibien, “M#emoires. . . .,” in Nicolas Poussin, Lettres et propos sur l’ art, ed. Anthony Blunt (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 196–97. It remains debatable whether Poussin actually said this, but it neatly sums up the position of the partisans of dessein in the academy. The assignment of the quotation to Poussin, France’s greatest painter, lends it the weight almost of a fiat. 15. Roland Fr# eart de Chambray, Id#e e de la perfection de la peinture (1662; reprint, Paris: ENSBA, 2005), 192. 35. Longinus, Trait#e du Sublime, 74. 24. Ibid., 76. 37. On the relation of enthousiasme to Longinus-Boileau’s sublime, see Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art, 106–24; and Kerslake, Essays on the Sublime, 139–46. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 107–8, describes enthousiasme’s relation to the sublime thus: “I have included the sublime in the definition of enthousiasme, because it is an effect and production of enthousiasme. Enthousiasme contains the sublime in the same manner as the trunk of a tree contains its branches, which it sends forth from different sides; or rather, enthousiasme is a sun, whose heat and influence produce elevated thoughts, and bring them to a state of maturity we call sublime. But since enthousiasme and the sublime both tend to elevate our mind, we can say that they are of the same nature. The difference seems to me, however, that enthousiasme is a passion of the blood that takes our soul even higher than the sublime, of which it is the source, and which has its principal effect in our thought and the tout ensemble of a work; whereas the sublime is felt equally in the general and the details of all the parts. Furthermore, the effect of enthousiasme is even more instantaneous, whereas the effect of the sublime requires at least a few moments of reflection before it can be seen in all its force.” As Puttfarken explains, enthousiasme, which is created by visual effects alone, comes before the sublime and is felt with more force. De Piles thus diminished the sublime to a response based on a painting’s subject matter that requires some reflection and subsumed the main qualities of LonginusBoileau’s sublime into his enthousiasme. 25. De Piles, as Puttfarken has shown (The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 272–77), came to this position gradually. Whereas earlier de Piles maintained that the premier coup d’ oeil should convey the nature of the painting’s subject matter, what he emphasizes by 1677 is the importance 39. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 40. On Crozat and his circle, see Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early 16. Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principe (1708; new ed., Paris, 1766), 4. 17. On the erotics of painting in de Piles, see Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 182–95; and Sylvaine Guyot, “Sur la toile comme en sc" ene, peindre l’amour pour ‘toucher,’” in “Les discours de l’amour,” ed. Kristen A. Dickhaut and Alain Viala, Litt#e ratures Classiques 2, no. 69 (2009): 39–44. 18. On illusionism in de Piles, see Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art, 46– 54; and Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 178–85. 19. Roger de Piles, Dialogue sur le coloris (Paris, 1699), 60. 20. Roger de Piles, Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres (Paris, 1681), 103–4. 21. On de Piles’s conception of disposition, which differs from Poussin’s and Le Brun’s use of the term, see Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art, 38– 124; and idem, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 263–78. 22. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 73–74. 23. Ibid., 100. 38. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 3. WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD Eighteenth-Century Paris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012); and Isabelle Tillerot, Jean de Jullienne et les collectionneurs de # son temps (Paris: Editions Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2011), 31–36. 40. In fact, Watteau’s name first appears in the Proc"e s-verbaux of the Royal Academy on April 6, 1709, the day de Piles’s death was announced to the body. Michel, Le “ c#e l"e bre Watteau,” 21. 41. See, among others, Alpers, The Making of Rubens, 87; and Mary Vidal, Watteau’ s Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. 136–37, 168–69. A notable exception is Donald Posner, who cautions, “[I]t is necessary to insist that de Piles’ . . . aesthetic ideals were most completely embodied in the work of such masters as Charles de la Fosse and François Lemoyne rather than Watteau.” Posner, “Concerning the ‘Mechanical’ Parts of Painting and the Artistic Culture of SeventeenthCentury France,” Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (December 1993): 597. Unfortunately, he does not elaborate. 42. Puttfarken makes a suggestive observation about Watteau’s abandonment of “the strong sense of corporeality and life which de Piles admired in Rubens,” yet strangely claims the same for François Boucher, whose treatment of the body continues in the Rubensian tradition in a far more normative way than Watteau’s. Puttfarken, “Composition, Perspective and Presence: Observations on Early Academic Theory in France,” in Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honor of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians (London: Phaidon, 1994), 301. 43. Paul Duro has also described Watteau’s practice as subversive of academic norms, but largely in the same terms as Bryson’s (“Watteau and Reverie”)—that is, as subversive of Le Brun’s discursive model of painting. See Duro, The Academy and Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 230–50. Watteau’s paintings have also been seen as politically subversive of the absolutist claims of the state at the end of Louis XIV’s reign. See Crow, Painters and Public Life, 45–78; Julie Anne Plax, Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Thomas E. Kaiser, “The Monarchy, Public Opinion, and the Subversions of Antoine Watteau,” in Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of His Time, ed. Mary Sheriff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 63–75; Georgia Cowart, “Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera and the Subversive Utopia of the Opera-Ballet,” Art Bulletin 83, no. 3 (September 2001): 461–78; and idem, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 222–52. My claims about Watteau’s art theoretical subversions do not exclude a political reading; at the same time, I do not wish to claim that their political significance can easily be characterized as subversive. See also n. 118 below. 44. Crow, Painters and Public Life, 65. 45. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 82. 46. On Watteau’s borrowings from Rubens, see Valentine Miller, “The Borrowings of Watteau,” Burlington Magazine 51, no. 292 (July 1927): 37–44. 47. Comte de Caylus, “La vie d’Antoine Watteau, peintre de figures et de paysage, lue "a l’Acad#emie le 3 f#evrier 1748 par le comte de Caylus,” in Vies anciennes de Watteau, ed. Pierre Rosenberg (Paris: Hermann, 1984), 72. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Mary Vidal, “Style as Subject in Watteau’s Images of Conversation,” in Sheriff, Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist, 85. 51. De Piles, L’ id#e e du peintre parfait (1699; reprint, Paris: Le Promeneur, 1993), 64. 52. Caylus, “La vie d’Antoine Watteau,” 74. 53. De Piles, Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture, et sur le jugement qu’ on doit faire des tableaux. . . . (Paris, 1677), 300. 54. Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 222. 55. On the importance of the proper distance in de Piles’s system, see ibid., 162–68, 222–23. 56. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l’ image: Questions pos#e es aux fins d’ une # histoire de l’ art (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), 280. 57. Le Brun, “Sentiments sur le discours du m#erite de la couleur,” 230–31. ome Delaplanche has noted that 58. De Piles, L’ id#e e du peintre parfait, 21. J#er^ French theorists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in contrast to some of their Italian counterparts, had little interest in facture or the materiality of paint. See Delaplanche, “La touche et la tache,” in Rubens contre Poussin: La querelle du coloris dans la peinture française a" la fin du XVIIe si"e cle, ed. Emmanuelle Delapierre, Matthieu Gilles, and H# el"ene Portiglia (Antwerp: Ludion, 2004), 61–69. 59. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Michel, Le “ c#e l"e bre Watteau,” 118, argues that Watteau’s borrowings represent an attempt to carve out a place for 335 himself within the history of art while paying homage to the authority of his predecessors, “who were not taken as an unsurpassable absolute, but as references which had to be confronted.” This is true as far as it goes, but it neglects, on the one hand, how common borrowings from the canon were among artists of Watteau’s generations and, on the other, how different Watteau’s mode of borrowing is from theirs. 60. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 103. 61. It is worth pointing out that despite the close friendship between Coypel and de Piles and clear evidence of the latter’s influence in the artist’s practice, Coypel’s own theoretical writings represent a notable attempt to reconcile the theoretical positions of the partisans of color and dessein. 62. See Delapierre et al., Rubens contre Poussin, 141. 63. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 303. 64. Roger de Piles, commentary on Charles-Alphonse Du Fresnoy, in L’ art de peinture, trans., ed., and commentary by de Piles (Paris, 1668; 2nd ed., 1673), 156. 65. In this light we can better understand Watteau’s continual recycling of figures. Caylus, “La vie d’Antoine Watteau,” 79, writes: “When he decided to make a painting he went straight to his collection of sketches. He chose the figures that suited him best at the moment. He formed groups from them, most often as a consequence of a background of countryside he already conceived of and prepared.” Their narrative specificity did not matter. What was important for Watteau was their compositional role; the reticent body’s move to the margins of the composition helped set the eye in motion. 66. I am far from the first to note that Watteau’s dynamic compositions refuse a fixed point of view or that they suggest motion. Vidal, Watteau’ s Painted Conversations, esp. 15, 136, has explained Watteau’s compositional strategies through engagement with the dynamics of aristocratic conversation. Similarly, Sarah Cohen has analyzed them in terms of the dynamics of aristocratic dance while, drawing from Crow, Painters and Public Life, 45–78, relating them to Watteau’s early experience as a painter of decorative grotesques. See Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien R#e gime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 209–41. My account, I want to emphasize, is not meant to exclude or refute these interpretations; indeed, I think they can, to varying degrees, stand together. My purpose is to explain the artist’s compositional strategies in terms of contemporary theories of composition and, from there, to draw conclusions about their significance in light of those theories—conclusions that lead in different directions from those proposed by other scholars. 67. Michel, Le “ c#e l"e bre Watteau,” 246, argues, contrary to previous scholarly consensus, that the Berlin canvas was in fact the first version of the painting, largely because of errors in “the disposition of figures according to the rules of perspective,” which do not fit with the artist’s ambition to be an academic painter and which he therefore would have corrected in the Louvre version, his reception piece for the academy. I do not share Michel’s view: as I have in part tried to show, I believe that Watteau, working within a de Pilean framework, was more concerned with the compositional relation of the figures to each other rather than to a landscape rendered in correct perspective. See n. 65 above. 68. For the argument that the pilgrims are departing Cythera rather than leaving for it, see Michael Levey, “The Real Theme of Watteau’s Embarkation for Cythera,” Burlington Magazine 103, no. 698 (May 1961): 180–85. 69. See, for example, G# erard Le Coat, “Le p" elerinage "a l’ile de Cyth" ere: Un sujet ‘aussi galant qu’allegorique,’” RACAR 2, no. 2 (1975): 9–23; Pierre ere,” in Watteau, 1684–1721, elerinage "a l’isle de Cith" Rosenberg, “Le p" # ed. M. Grasselli and Rosenberg (Paris: Editions de la R#eunion des Mus# ees Nationaux, 1984), 399–401; and Posner, Antoine Watteau, 182– 95. 70. The implications of dance for our understanding of Watteau have been explored extensively by Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture, 166–270. 71. Alain Viala, La France galante: Essai historique sur une cat#e gorie culturelle, de ses origines jusqu’ a" la R#e volution (Paris: PUF, 2008). Viala’s book is preceded by a number of articles. See, for example, “La litt# erature galante, histoire et probl# ematique,” in Il seicento francese oggi: Situazione e prospettive della ricerca; Actes du colloque international, ed. Giovanni Dotoli (Bari: Adriatica; Paris: Nizet, 1994), 100–113; “D’une politique des formes, la galanterie,” XVIIe Si"e cle 46, no. 182 (1994): 142–51; “L’esprit galant,” Biblio 17 102 (1997): 99–109; “Qui t’a fait minor? Galanterie et classicisme,” Litt#e ratures Classiques 31 (1997): 99–109; and “Les Signes Galants: A Historical Reevaluation of Galanterie,” Yale French Studies, no. 92 (1997): 11–29. See also Delphine Denis, Le Parnasse galant: Institution d’ une cat#e gorie litt#e raire au XVIIe si"e cle (Paris: Champion, 2001). 72. Viala, La France galante, 331. 73. See Crow, Painters and Public Life, 66–74; Vidal, Watteau’ s Painted Conversations; Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture, 209–41; Plax, 336 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3 Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France, 108–53; Cowart, “Watteau’s Pilgrimage to Cythera”; and idem, The Triumph of Pleasure, 222–52. For accounts that have attempted to link Watteau to galanterie in light of Viala’s work as well as other recent work on the subject, see Kristen Dickhaut, “Touch#e! La symphathie affect#ee par la galanterie chez Watteau et Marivaux,” in Dickhaut and Viala, “Les discours de l’amour,” 109–24; and Frauke Annegret Kurbacher-Sch€ onborn, “Le reniement du coeur: Quelques r#eflexions philosophiques sur la liaison dangereuse entre l’amour sensible et l’individualit#e (Watteau et Rousseau),” in ibid., 141–59; as well as Viala’s own extended reflections on the artist in La France galante, 323–55. Viala’s discussion of Watteau as a quintessentially galant artist is the starting point of my own, but he characterizes the artist’s work in more general terms than I do. He defines Watteau’s work as “peinture d’ambience,” or painter of atmosphere; in their lack of defined subject and formal ambiguity, Viala claims, his paintings manifest an indefinable air of enigma and vaghezza. 74. As Viala, La France galante, 228, notes, “Galanterie . . . provoked querelles, several, and multiform.” 75. Jean Lafond, “La beaut#e et la gr^ace: L’#esthetique ‘platonicienne’ des Amours de Psych#e,” Revue d’ Histoire Litt#e raire de la France 69 (1969): 475– 90, gives some idea of the galant resistance to the Longinian sublime. For bibliography of the sublime and seventeenth-century responses to it, see n. 34 above. 76. Chevalier de M#er#e, “Des agr#emens” (1677), in Oeuvres compl"e tes, ed. Charles-Henri Boudhors (Paris: Klincksieck, 2008), 38. Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 191–95, discusses the Chevalier de M#er# e’s rejection of the de Pilean aesthetic. 77. Dominic Bouhours, La mani"e re de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’ esprit (1687; new ed., Paris, 1715), 385. 78. Lafond, “La beaut#e et la gr^ace,” 477. 79. On the relation of these terms to enthousiasme, see Puttfarken, Roger de Piles’ Theory of Art, 106–24. 80. Viala, La France galante, 378. 81. Published versions of Longinus’s treatises circulated in Greek and Latin translations since the sixteenth century, and manuscripts in French also circulated, but their impact was limited to relatively small circles of #e rudits. It was not until Boileau’s version, the first published French edition, that it achieved a position of such centrality in literary and artistic theory. For an overview of the sublime in France before Boileau’s edi# Madelein Martin, “The ‘Prehistory’ of the Sublime in Early tion, see Eva Modern Europe,” in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 77–101. 82. James Elkins draws on the je ne sais quoi to understand what he calls Watteau’s “anti-subject” in Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? (New York: Routledge, 1999), 159–73; as does Viala, La France galante, 323–55. Elkins also draws on Bouhours’s d#e licatesse but does not adequately distinguish it from the je ne sais quoi, introduced in the author’s earlier work, Entretiens d’ Ariste et d’ Eug"e ne of 1671. D#e licatesse represents a refinement of Bouhours’s thinking on the je ne sais quoi (in which surprise and dazzlement are key elements), prompted in part by the publication of Longinus-Boileau’s Trait#e du sublime in 1674. On the relation of the je ne sais quoi and d#e licatesse to the sublime, see Litman, Le sublime en France, 105– 20; Kerslake, Essays on the sublime, 95–110; Cronk, The Classical Sublime, 132–36; and Hache, La langue du ciel, 86–99. Cronk and Hache write most explicitly of d#e licatesse as a critique of the sublime. On gr^ a ce, see Lafond, “La beaut#e et la gr^ace.” 83. Bouhours, La mani"e re de bien penser, 107. 84. Ibid., 214. 85. Ibid., 213. 86. Dictionnaire de l’ Acad#e mie (Paris, 1694), at Classiques Garnier Num# erique: Dictionnaires des 16e et 17e s., http://www.classiquesgarnier.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/numerique-bases/index.php? moduleDApp&actionDFrameMain. 87. Florence Orwat, L’ invention de la r^ e verie: Une conqu^ e te pacifique du Grand Si"e cle (Paris: Honor#e Champion, 2006). See also Bernard Beugnot, “Po# etique de la r^ everie,” in La m#e moire du texte: Essais de po#e tique classique (Paris: Honor# e Champion, 1994); and Robert J. Morrissey, La r^ e verie jusqu’ a" Rousseau (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1984). 88. On galanterie, particularly in its literary incarnations, and reverie, see Orwat, L’ invention de la r^ e verie, 323–400. 89. Madeleine de Scud#ery, Cl#e lie, histoire romaine, pt. 2 (1655; new ed., Paris: Honor# e Champion, 2002), 313–14. On Scud#ery and reverie, see Orwat, L’ invention de la r^ e verie, 337–51. 90. Chevalier de M#er#e, Maximes, sentences et r#e flexions morales et politiques (Paris, 1687), 38. 91. On the diffusion of galanterie, see Viala, La France galante, 258–97. 92. Antoine Coypel, “Sur l’excellence de la peinture,” in M# erot, Les conf#e rences de l’ Acad#e mie Royale, 525–26. 93. Ibid., 526. 94. Michel, Le “ c#e l"e bre Watteau,” discusses the relationship between Coypel’s theories and Watteau at length, though he does not discuss reverie. 95. On the rise of private spaces and its relation to selfhood, see Orest Ranum, “The Refuges of Intimacy,” in A History of Private Life, vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1989), 207–64. 96. On the appeal of Watteau’s technique to the amateur, see Posner, “Concerning the ‘Mechanical’ Parts of Painting,” 597–98. 97. Antoine Coypel, “Sur l’esth# etique du peintre,” in M# erot, Les conf#e rences de l’ Acad#e mie Royale, 419. 98. On the emergence of the amateur, as a category distinct from the connoisseur and the curieux, see Ziskin, Sheltering Art, 205–7. Coypel, “Sur l’esth# etique du peintre,” it should be noted, does not use the term amateur here-—he uses the term “gens du monde”—which is not surprising, since the term was only beginning to be codified and institutionalized, and to acquire a more specialized sense, when Coypel was writing. The term first appears in Antoine Fureti" ere’s Dictionnaire in 1690; it is not yet in the 1687 edition. See Fureti" ere, Dictionnaire universel. . . . (Rotterdam, 1690), at Classiques Garnier Num# erique, http://www.classiques-garnier. com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/numerique-bases/index.php? moduleDApp&actionDFrameMain. On later developments of the amateur in the eighteenth century, see Charlotte Guichard, Les amateurs d’ art a" Paris au XVIIIe si"e cle (Seyssel: Champ Valon, 2008). 99. Coypel, “Sur l’excellence de la peinture,” 526. 100. Orwat, L’ invention de la r^ e verie, 181–385; and Bernard Beugnot, Le discours de la retraite au XVIIe si"e cle (Paris: PUF, 1996), 87–109. 101. Fr# ed# eric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ ancienne langue franç aise et de tous des dialectes du 9e au 15e si"e cles (Paris, 1881–1902), at Classiques Garnier Num# erique, http://www.classiques-garnier.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard. edu/numerique-bases/index.php?moduleDApp&actionDFrameMain. 102. Orwat, L’ invention de la r^ e verie, 19–42. 103. Vidal, “Style as Subject in Watteau’s Images of Conversation,” 83, makes a similar point about how the non-fini of Watteau’s brushwork activates the spectator’s imagination. See also idem, Watteau’ s Painted Conversations, 130. 104. De Piles, commentary on L’ art de peinture, 155. 105. Though it would be unwise to presume to know the state of Watteau’s mind as he created his art, we should remember that de Piles believed enthousiasme affected the artist as well. It is tempting, therefore, to speculate that Watteau, too, was understood to have been in a state of reverie when he drew and painted. Caylus’s remark that Watteau “drew sans objet” (“La vie d’Antoine Watteau,” 78), or without purpose, suggests a manual process parallel to the mental processes of reverie, or thinking sans objet. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has recently highlighted the mechanized, aleatory dimension of Watteau’s drawing practice, which, again, brings to mind the semiconscious state of reverie. Lajer-Burcharth, “Le temps du dessin, dessiner le temps: Watteau” (lecture, Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 21, 2013). 106. Scud# ery, Cl#e lie, pt. 2, 314. 107. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 297. 108. On selfhood in early modern Europe, see, for various perspectives, Bernard Tocanne, L’ id#e e de la nature en France dans la seconde moiti#e du XVIIe si"e cle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), 141–65; Robert Muchembled, L’ invention de l’ homme moderne: Sensibilit#e s, moeurs et comportements collectifs sous l’ Ancien R#e gime (Paris: Fayard, 1988); Charles Taylor, Sources of Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1996); Jean Rohou, Le XVIIe # si"e cle, une r#e volution de la conscience humaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002); and Dror Wharman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). On the rise of interiority in seventeenth-century France, see Bernard Beugnot, “Loisir, retraite, solitude: De l’espace priv# e "a la erature,” in Le loisir lettr#e a" l’ a^ge classique, ed. Marc Fumaroli, Philippelitt# Joseph Salazar, and Emmanuel Bury (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 173–96; Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Si"e cle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 78–123; and Benedetta Papasogli, Le “ fond du coeur” : Figures de l’ espace int#e rieur au XVIIe si"e cle (Paris: Honor# e Champion, 2000). everie,” eraire: La pr#ehistoire de la r^ 109. Robert Morrissey, “Vers un topos litt# Modern Philology 77, no. 3 (February 1980): 270–80; and Orwat, L’ invention de la r^ e verie, 43–64. 110. Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue franç aise du 16e si"e cle (Paris, 1925–73), at Classiques Garnier Num# erique, http://www.classiques- WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD garnier.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/numerique-bases/index.php? moduleDApp&actionDFrameMain. 111. Fureti" ere, Dictionnaire universel. We have here, it might be noted, a basis for rebutting Donald Posner’s claim that melancholy in Watteau is only a nineteenth-century myth, though we would have to be careful about differentiating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of melancholy. See Posner, “Watteau m#elancolique: La formation d’un mythe,” Bulletin de la Soci#e t#e de l’ Histoire de l’ Art Franç ais (1973): 345–61. 112. Madeleine de Scud#ery, La promenade de Versailles (Paris, 1669), 91. 113. On reverie and the rise of modern selfhood and interiority, see Orwat, L’ invention de la r^ e verie, 351–85, 429–75; Morrissey, La r^ e verie jusqu’ a" Rousseau, 55–76; and Beugnot, Le discours de la retraite au XVIIe si"e cle, 192–97. On civility and selfhood, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennel (1939; rev. ed., Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994); and Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Civility,” in Chartier, Passions of the Renaissance, 167–206. Of course, reverie is itself inextricable from the emergence of civility; on reverie’s relation to civility, see Orwat, 450-69. 114. It is a striking and irresistible historical coincidence that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth century’s most famous champion of reverie, would later seek refuge here in 1756. 115. Alan Wintermute, “La Perspective,” in Claude to Corot: The Development of Landscape Painting in France (New York: Colnaghi, 1990), 131–37; and Hans Junecke, Montmorency: Der Landsitz Charles Le Brun’ s; Geschichte, Gestalt und die “ Ile Enchant#e e” (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling, 1960), 20–21. 116. Robert Neuman, “Watteau’s L’ Enseigne de Gersaint and the Baroque Emblematic Tradition,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 104 (November 1984): 154–57. 117. On the theme of death in Poussin and Watteau, see Erwin Panofsky, “On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (1936; New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 223–54. 118. In her reading, Katie Scott makes a connection between the Ch^ateau de Montmorency and Versailles and between Le Brun and Louis XIV, 337 suggesting that the “carcass” (as she evocatively puts it) of Le Brun’s ch^ateau might be interpreted as evidence of “discrete expressions of revolt built into the very structure of the image” against the absolutist state. Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 157–59. It is a compelling claim, but Scott’s comparison between Montmorency and Versailles, based on what she assumes are formal similarities between Le Brun’s garden and Louis XIV’s garden, is questionable. Scott writes, “[I]n Watteau’s picture the exaggeration of the perspectival strength once used by a giant’s hand to lay down such gardens, has so overgrown the orthogonals that the trees seem to obscure rather than ease passage to the gutted space beyond a conspicuously fragile, almost temporary looking, classical façade” (157). The problematic assumption of a monolithic classicism at Versailles that overshadows such an analysis aside, Le Brun’s ch^ateau and gardens in fact represented a prototypically galant escape. Junecke, Montmorency, 11–65, has shown that Montmorency, unlike Versailles, was conceived with an obstructed view and that Watteau’s picture is for the most part faithful to the way the park looked; Montmorency did not spectacularly tyrannize nature in the way Versailles did. Moreover, as Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 245–78, has demonstrated, perspective occupied a place of far less importance than internal compositional harmony (that is, the tout ensemble) in de Piles’s system, and, indeed, in French art theory more generally. Perspective is thus less significant an issue in Watteau’s painting than Scott seems to assume—its title, added after the artist’s death, notwithstanding. In more general terms, I am hesitant to ascribe straightforward political meaning to Watteau’s compositional strategies. The history of the complex relation of the emergence of interiority to absolutism remains to be written, and while Watteau’s invitation to reverie is indisputably politically fraught, I do not believe it can be reduced to subversion, or support, of absolutism. 119. De Piles, commentary on L’ art de peinture, 154–55; and idem, Cours de peinture, 99. 120. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 3. 121. Ibid., 107.