1716
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Study for "The Romancer" (Le Conteur) is a 1716 by Jean Antoine Watteau, a Baroque work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a man in a striped suit leaning over a young musician, hand on his shoulder, while another man in a loose white outfit watches from behind. This is a quick sketch Watteau made before painting the final scene. The characters come from Italian comedy plays that were all the rage in 1700s France—think slapstick, masks, and cheeky flirting. The loose lines let you feel the artist’s hand moving fast, almost like he’s acting out the scene himself. For more of these playful theater sketches, look up *subject: france, 18th century*.
This sheet was a preparatory study for the painting The Romancer . An actor in the costume of Mezzetin, a stock character of the commedia dell’arte (a type of satirical theatrical entertainment of Italian origin popular in aristocratic circles in 18th-century France), interrupts a guitarist with a bold sexual advance. Another actor dressed as the French pantomime stock character Pierrot peers lasciviously over the young musician’s shoulder. A more detailed study of Pierrot’s head occupies the upper left corner of the sheet, demonstrating Jean Antoine Watteau’s experimentation with how to most…
Jean Antoine Watteau likely drew this sheet from a combination of life study and imagination, working from a model and adding other elements of his own creation.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter and draughtsman whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement, as seen in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens.
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