GENERAL DESCRIPTION
This painting is a testament to the subtlety of Jean-Baptiste Pater's art at its finest. Although obviously indebted to his mentor, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pater's own sense of design and poetry lends this work the kind of luminescence and languorous grace for which he was so prized by collectors. This canvas was conceived with a pendant painting, and they are both conventional in their evocation of the seasonal pairing of the activities of fall and spring. The harvesting of grapes, as seen in this painting, is a typical activity of autumn, while outdoor bathing belongs to the warmth of springtime. However, Pater's thematic pairing also alludes to the mythological association of Bacchus and Venus. Bacchus, the God of wine is symbolically present in the form of the sculpted putti, one of which holds a sheaf of wheat. A Greek herm at the far right of the composition oversees this updated celebration of the feast of Bacchus. As we study the multiple pairs of couples arranged across the composition, a more sinister element emerges. The couple seated on the ground at center is actually struggling against each other, as the woman tries to pull away from her too aggressive lover. His near twin, in a red vest to the far right is about to pelt his competitor with an apple, while on the opposite side, a leering man dressed in theatrical cape and hat stares hungrily at the bosom of the young girl, kneeling at his feet. This outdoor party, it seems, is on the verge of erupting into the violent excesses of the followers of Bacchus, who are traditionally represented in a mad frenzy of lust and drunken revelry.
Pater was the only official pupil of Watteau. Like Watteau, he was a native of Valenciennes. He must have followed Watteau to Paris after the latter's short stay in Valenciennes in 1710. Although Watteau is said to have mistreated his young disciple, cutting short his apprenticeship out of bad temper, he is also believed to have relented towards the end of his life. In 1721 the dying Watteau called his once rejected student to his side, so that he might impart to him the secrets of his art. When Watteau died, Pater 'finished' his master's last paintings. Quickly thereafter, he became the favorite of many of Watteau's wealthiest patrons, including Frederick the Great, who owned some fifty of his most beautiful canvases. Pater enjoyed a prosperous career, only falling into neglect with the fall of the ancien regime, with which his elegant art was inevitably identified.
Adapted from
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 17-18.
NOTES
former number according to education doc- T43007.30.1
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
Checked Piction
Aristocratic men and women frolic and flirt in elegant outdoor settings. Eighteenth-century audiences would have delighted in the dreamlike surroundings and the playful pursuit of love.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
PATER and FETE GALANTE
Two paintings by Jean-Baptiste Pater in the Rosenberg Collection that could have hung at one time in Gersaint’s shop—either sold to his clientele or commissioned directly from the artist—are a scene of nymphs bathing (see fig. 64, p. 90) and a fête champêtre, a rustic type of fête galante (see fig. 58, p. 82). These are typical lighthearted pictures to decorate the salon or boudoir of a townhouse in the Saint-Honoré quartier. The general spirit is not so far from Lemoyne’s Bather. In fact, the painting of nymphs bathing is full of attractive young women in various states of dress and undress, seen from a range of different angles. With the fête galante subject, various couples and children are flirting or playing in a rather dreamy, imaginary landscape. The fête galante (which is not really translatable) was invented in the early 1700s by Pater’s teacher, Watteau, one of the seminal figures of eighteenth-century French painting. Fête galante usually implies a scene of flirtation, an amorous picnic taking place in a well-manicured park, often accompanied by music and dancing. He produced many such works, as there was a big demand for this kind of lighthearted and flirtatious subject matter. (15-16)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Two major and representative works in the Michael L. Rosenberg Collection, a fête galante and a scene of female bathers, provide a starting point to cast new light on Pater, his particular qualities, and his position in eighteenth-century painting.
In the fête galante (fig. 58), a group of young men, women, and several children have assembled in the foreground of a wide, rural landscape. A sculpture of two putti and a fountain in a trellis pavilion on the left and a sculpted male term on the right frame the composition, creating a garden-like setting. The scene is not set in a park, for French gardens in Pater’s lifetime were formal and in no way resembled later developments of the English garden. A more rural—in fact, agricultural—environment is also evoked by a group of peasants harvesting grapes in the middle ground and by a kneeling woman on the far left offering fruit that has just been picked. The background landscape keeps a balance between the agricultural and the picturesque, referring to Arcadian ideals. It evokes an environment of open-air bliss, as perceived by an urban elite which had always kept a safe distance from agricultural labor, but felt attracted to a seemingly natural, stress-free environment and the exotic quality of manual work. The sculptures help us to understand that we are in an environment half-imagined and half-observed, a landscape that is embellished by peaceful traces of human habitation, but pretends to be natural. The shallow trellis pavilion and the rocaille style of the cartouche carried by the two putti both put us firmly into an early rococo world. The male term on the right evokes classical ruins in an Arcadian landscape. Manual labor is strictly confined to the more simply dressed peasants. The fashionable young people in the foreground enjoy the leisure of conversation, of flirting, or of simply doing nothing— sociability without practical purpose. In this painting, Pater literally follows the template of Watteau’s fêtes galantes that could be described in the same terms. Pater has taken this new type of painting directly from him.
Dress is an important signifier in Pater’s fête galante. It clearly demarcates the differences between the leisured class on the one side, and servants and peasants on the other. In the midst of what seems to be a quintessentially eighteenth-century vision of carefree outdoor existence, at least three figures do not fit the surrounding group. The man on the left leaning toward his female partner in white, the woman in a black bodice and white skirt in the right foreground, and also the little boy at the center looking at the woman who is holding her apron to gather fruit are all wearing costumes that are markedly out-of-date for Pater’s lifetime. Their lace collars and the brown and black colors of their tops denote a dress that is different from the colorful silk dresses of their friends and was understood as “Spanish” dress (“à l’espagnol”) by Pater’s a broadly defined seventeenth-century style. Watteau’s development of the fête galante had fused into a new phenomenon three powerful and popular traditions: the Italian pastoral landscape, Flemish seventeenth-century rural genre, and contemporary French fashion and costumes. Pater, in his fête galante, has placed the emphasis on the latter two, but the references to the “Spanish” dress are obvious enough to clearly link the scene to a visual ancestry much appreciated by contemporary collectors internationally.
His pictures tell stories—something Watteau deliberately avoided. We could almost say that Watteau sealed his images off from any clear narrative, while Pater purposefully explored narrative possibilities.
Pater continued Watteau’s genre of the fête galante, but inspiration from the slightly older artist was also used in a much more literal fashion. Some figures and groups in the Rosenberg painting have very close parallels in Watteau’s work.
In the Rosenberg painting, Pater has kept elements of Watteau’s compositions he saw during his first stay with the older artist—the strong diagonal void in the center, for example, that is a recurrent feature in Watteau’s earlier fêtes galantes and in most of Pater’s works throughout his career. But the colors have brightened and the figures have gained movement and three-dimensionality in a way that can best be explained in comparison with works from the last years of Watteau’s life. Similarly, all the comparisons made between the Rosenberg fête galante and the Watteau figures earlier in this essay refer to paintings from Watteau’s last years: the Berlin fête galante from around 1717/19 (fig. 60), La Surprise from around 1718/19, the Berlin version of Pilgrimage to Cythera from around 1719, and Récréation italienne from around 1720/21 (fig. 59). Watteau had gone through major transformations by the time he undertook these late works. One of them was his new tendency to arrange most figures close and parallel to the picture plane, as is well illustrated by the painting in Berlin. Pater continued Watteau’s earlier compositional templates, but he updated his motifs considerably when he went back to the then-ailing Watteau.
In the late works before his death in 1721, Watteau had already paved the way for some stylistic changes that from today’s perspective we would call the transition from Régence, or French Regency style, to Rococo, to a more surface-oriented style with a flatter space, with compositions around scrolling lines, and with a brighter palette. These new features also became the hallmark of Pater’s style in the 1720s—his contribution to this development in painting, which is mainly overlooked by art historians and critics. The Rosenberg paintings are no pioneering early examples, but fully emblematic of this new style. A line that leads from the standing man on the left via the kneeling woman holding a basket to the woman in white and upward to the man plucking fruit describes a rococo scroll. It winds around another feature that illustrates the new style perfectly: the sculpture of two putti holding a rococo cartouche with its asymmetrical frame crowned by a shell illustrates the new “style pittoresque,” as does the chipped stone plinth and the trellis ornament. It is worth stressing that Pater could not have taken an object of that character from any of Watteau’s works.
The two paintings from the Rosenberg Collection are also a good example of another novel approach in Pater’s work, the conscious combination of paintings in pairs or groups of four. Watteau had not produced obvious pendants in his oeuvre. It was because contemporary collectors were used to hanging paintings in symmetrical arrangements that Watteau’s Shop Sign (see fig. 3, p. 16) was cut in half.30 Pater, who was apprised of market demands throughout his career, preempted such modifications by catering directly to that need. This was a practical consideration, in reaction to contemporary conventions of picture hanging, but it also gave him the opportunity to work with contrast and variety through the combinations.
FETE GALANTE and the ACADEMY:
Today we are used to calling the fête galante a pictorial genre, but the evidence for this is surprisingly complicated. Watteau was the inventor of the fête galante, the modernizer of the Arcadian tradition in French painting. But contrary to a long-standing conviction, he was accepted by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1717 as a history painter when he handed in his most famous fête galante, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère) (see fig. 32, p. 45).5 According to contemporary terminology, a history painter was understood to be able to cover all aspects of painting and to master the depiction of the human figure, actions, and passions. Watteau’s paintings are remarkably void of both action and the passions, but his rank as a full member indicates the high respect his art enjoyed. When Pater became a member of the Academy in 1728, the situation had changed. He was accepted as the second painter, after Nicolas Lancret, “dans le talent particulier des fêtes galantes” (“in the specialty of fêtes galantes”), a title that put him in a lower rank by describing the main part of his output as a more limited specialty.6 Ironically, we would not necessarily call his reception piece a fête galante. The term had been used by the Academy for the first time in connection with Watteau (as a title of his reception piece, not as a general description of his work), and it is obvious that Pater’s fellow Academicians saw him in direct relationship, if inferior in status, to his recently deceased model.
Excerpt from
Christoph Martin Vogtherr, "Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fête Galante," 81-94, in French Art of the Eighteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Full General Description:
This pair of paintings is a testament to the subtlety of Pater's art at its finest. Although obviously indebted to his mentor, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pater's own sense of design and poetry lend these works the kind of luminescence and languorous grace for which he was so prized by collectors. The two canvases were conceived as pendants and are conventional in their evocation of the seasonal pairing of the activities of fall and spring. The harvesting of grapes is a typical activity of autumn, while outdoor bathing belongs to the warmth of springtime. However, Pater's thematic pairing also alludes to the mythological association of Bacchus and Venus. Bacchus, the God of wine is symbolically present in the form of the sculpted putti, one of which holds a sheaf of wheat. A Greek herm at the far right of the composition oversees this updated celebration ofthe feast of Bacchus. As we study the multiple pairs of couples arranged across the composition, a more sinister element emerges. The couple seated on the ground at center is actually struggling against each other, as the woman tries to pull away from her too aggressive lover. His near twin, in a red vest to the far right is about to pelt his competitor with an apple, while on the opposite side, a leering man dressed in theatrical cape and hat stares hungrily at the bosom of the young girl, kneeling at his feet. This outdoor party, it seems, is on the verge of erupting into the violent excesses of the followers of Bacchus, who are traditionally represented in a mad frenzy of lust and drunken revelry. The aegis of Bacchus is also present in Nymphs Bathing, though in a less menacing way, again through a sculptural group ofputti, one of which is mounting a she-goat. One attendant washes the feet of a modern-day Venus, while her companions, all in various states of undress, rise up in alarm at the young peeping Toms they have discovered hidden in the bushes.
Pater was the only official pupil of Watteau. Like Watteau, he was a native of Valenciennes. He must have followed Watteau to Paris after the latter's short stay in Valenciennes in 1710. Although Watteau is said to have mistreated his young disciple, cutting short his apprenticeship out of bad temper, he is also believed to have relented towards the end of his life. In 1721 the dying Watteau called his once rejected student to his side, so that he might impart to him the secrets of his art. When Watteau died, Pater 'finished' his master's last paintings. Quickly thereafter, he became the favorite of many of Watteau's wealthiest patrons, including Frederick the Great, who owned some fifty of his most beautiful canvases. Pater enjoyed a prosperous career, only falling into neglect with the fall of the ancien regime, with which his elegant art was inevitably identified.
Excerpt from
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 17-18.
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254297994: UMO Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fete Galante After the Detah of Antoine Watteau
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General Description
This painting is a testament to the subtlety of Jean-Baptiste Pater's art at its finest. Although obviously indebted to his mentor, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pater's own sense of design and poetry lends this work the kind of luminescence and languorous grace for which he was so prized by collectors. This canvas was conceived with a pendant painting, and they are both conventional in their evocation of the seasonal pairing of the activities of fall and spring. The harvesting of grapes, as seen in this painting, is a typical activity of autumn, while outdoor bathing belongs to the warmth of springtime. However, Pater's thematic pairing also alludes to the mythological association of Bacchus and Venus. Bacchus, the God of wine is symbolically present in the form of the sculpted putti, one of which holds a sheaf of wheat. A Greek herm at the far right of the composition oversees this updated celebration of the feast of Bacchus. As we study the multiple pairs of couples arranged across the composition, a more sinister element emerges. The couple seated on the ground at center is actually struggling against each other, as the woman tries to pull away from her too aggressive lover. His near twin, in a red vest to the far right is about to pelt his competitor with an apple, while on the opposite side, a leering man dressed in theatrical cape and hat stares hungrily at the bosom of the young girl, kneeling at his feet. This outdoor party, it seems, is on the verge of erupting into the violent excesses of the followers of Bacchus, who are traditionally represented in a mad frenzy of lust and drunken revelry.
Pater was the only official pupil of Watteau. Like Watteau, he was a native of Valenciennes. He must have followed Watteau to Paris after the latter's short stay in Valenciennes in 1710. Although Watteau is said to have mistreated his young disciple, cutting short his apprenticeship out of bad temper, he is also believed to have relented towards the end of his life. In 1721 the dying Watteau called his once rejected student to his side, so that he might impart to him the secrets of his art. When Watteau died, Pater 'finished' his master's last paintings. Quickly thereafter, he became the favorite of many of Watteau's wealthiest patrons, including Frederick the Great, who owned some fifty of his most beautiful canvases. Pater enjoyed a prosperous career, only falling into neglect with the fall of the ancien regime, with which his elegant art was inevitably identified.
Adapted from
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 17-18.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
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Notes
former number according to education doc- T43007.30.1
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
Checked Piction
Aristocratic men and women frolic and flirt in elegant outdoor settings. Eighteenth-century audiences would have delighted in the dreamlike surroundings and the playful pursuit of love.
From- didactic and label copy in education files, no date or author.
PATER and FETE GALANTE
Two paintings by Jean-Baptiste Pater in the Rosenberg Collection that could have hung at one time in Gersaint’s shop—either sold to his clientele or commissioned directly from the artist—are a scene of nymphs bathing (see fig. 64, p. 90) and a fête champêtre, a rustic type of fête galante (see fig. 58, p. 82). These are typical lighthearted pictures to decorate the salon or boudoir of a townhouse in the Saint-Honoré quartier. The general spirit is not so far from Lemoyne’s Bather. In fact, the painting of nymphs bathing is full of attractive young women in various states of dress and undress, seen from a range of different angles. With the fête galante subject, various couples and children are flirting or playing in a rather dreamy, imaginary landscape. The fête galante (which is not really translatable) was invented in the early 1700s by Pater’s teacher, Watteau, one of the seminal figures of eighteenth-century French painting. Fête galante usually implies a scene of flirtation, an amorous picnic taking place in a well-manicured park, often accompanied by music and dancing. He produced many such works, as there was a big demand for this kind of lighthearted and flirtatious subject matter. (15-16)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Two major and representative works in the Michael L. Rosenberg Collection, a fête galante and a scene of female bathers, provide a starting point to cast new light on Pater, his particular qualities, and his position in eighteenth-century painting.
In the fête galante (fig. 58), a group of young men, women, and several children have assembled in the foreground of a wide, rural landscape. A sculpture of two putti and a fountain in a trellis pavilion on the left and a sculpted male term on the right frame the composition, creating a garden-like setting. The scene is not set in a park, for French gardens in Pater’s lifetime were formal and in no way resembled later developments of the English garden. A more rural—in fact, agricultural—environment is also evoked by a group of peasants harvesting grapes in the middle ground and by a kneeling woman on the far left offering fruit that has just been picked. The background landscape keeps a balance between the agricultural and the picturesque, referring to Arcadian ideals. It evokes an environment of open-air bliss, as perceived by an urban elite which had always kept a safe distance from agricultural labor, but felt attracted to a seemingly natural, stress-free environment and the exotic quality of manual work. The sculptures help us to understand that we are in an environment half-imagined and half-observed, a landscape that is embellished by peaceful traces of human habitation, but pretends to be natural. The shallow trellis pavilion and the rocaille style of the cartouche carried by the two putti both put us firmly into an early rococo world. The male term on the right evokes classical ruins in an Arcadian landscape. Manual labor is strictly confined to the more simply dressed peasants. The fashionable young people in the foreground enjoy the leisure of conversation, of flirting, or of simply doing nothing— sociability without practical purpose. In this painting, Pater literally follows the template of Watteau’s fêtes galantes that could be described in the same terms. Pater has taken this new type of painting directly from him.
Dress is an important signifier in Pater’s fête galante. It clearly demarcates the differences between the leisured class on the one side, and servants and peasants on the other. In the midst of what seems to be a quintessentially eighteenth-century vision of carefree outdoor existence, at least three figures do not fit the surrounding group. The man on the left leaning toward his female partner in white, the woman in a black bodice and white skirt in the right foreground, and also the little boy at the center looking at the woman who is holding her apron to gather fruit are all wearing costumes that are markedly out-of-date for Pater’s lifetime. Their lace collars and the brown and black colors of their tops denote a dress that is different from the colorful silk dresses of their friends and was understood as “Spanish” dress (“à l’espagnol”) by Pater’s a broadly defined seventeenth-century style. Watteau’s development of the fête galante had fused into a new phenomenon three powerful and popular traditions: the Italian pastoral landscape, Flemish seventeenth-century rural genre, and contemporary French fashion and costumes. Pater, in his fête galante, has placed the emphasis on the latter two, but the references to the “Spanish” dress are obvious enough to clearly link the scene to a visual ancestry much appreciated by contemporary collectors internationally.
His pictures tell stories—something Watteau deliberately avoided. We could almost say that Watteau sealed his images off from any clear narrative, while Pater purposefully explored narrative possibilities.
Pater continued Watteau’s genre of the fête galante, but inspiration from the slightly older artist was also used in a much more literal fashion. Some figures and groups in the Rosenberg painting have very close parallels in Watteau’s work.
In the Rosenberg painting, Pater has kept elements of Watteau’s compositions he saw during his first stay with the older artist—the strong diagonal void in the center, for example, that is a recurrent feature in Watteau’s earlier fêtes galantes and in most of Pater’s works throughout his career. But the colors have brightened and the figures have gained movement and three-dimensionality in a way that can best be explained in comparison with works from the last years of Watteau’s life. Similarly, all the comparisons made between the Rosenberg fête galante and the Watteau figures earlier in this essay refer to paintings from Watteau’s last years: the Berlin fête galante from around 1717/19 (fig. 60), La Surprise from around 1718/19, the Berlin version of Pilgrimage to Cythera from around 1719, and Récréation italienne from around 1720/21 (fig. 59). Watteau had gone through major transformations by the time he undertook these late works. One of them was his new tendency to arrange most figures close and parallel to the picture plane, as is well illustrated by the painting in Berlin. Pater continued Watteau’s earlier compositional templates, but he updated his motifs considerably when he went back to the then-ailing Watteau.
In the late works before his death in 1721, Watteau had already paved the way for some stylistic changes that from today’s perspective we would call the transition from Régence, or French Regency style, to Rococo, to a more surface-oriented style with a flatter space, with compositions around scrolling lines, and with a brighter palette. These new features also became the hallmark of Pater’s style in the 1720s—his contribution to this development in painting, which is mainly overlooked by art historians and critics. The Rosenberg paintings are no pioneering early examples, but fully emblematic of this new style. A line that leads from the standing man on the left via the kneeling woman holding a basket to the woman in white and upward to the man plucking fruit describes a rococo scroll. It winds around another feature that illustrates the new style perfectly: the sculpture of two putti holding a rococo cartouche with its asymmetrical frame crowned by a shell illustrates the new “style pittoresque,” as does the chipped stone plinth and the trellis ornament. It is worth stressing that Pater could not have taken an object of that character from any of Watteau’s works.
The two paintings from the Rosenberg Collection are also a good example of another novel approach in Pater’s work, the conscious combination of paintings in pairs or groups of four. Watteau had not produced obvious pendants in his oeuvre. It was because contemporary collectors were used to hanging paintings in symmetrical arrangements that Watteau’s Shop Sign (see fig. 3, p. 16) was cut in half.30 Pater, who was apprised of market demands throughout his career, preempted such modifications by catering directly to that need. This was a practical consideration, in reaction to contemporary conventions of picture hanging, but it also gave him the opportunity to work with contrast and variety through the combinations.
FETE GALANTE and the ACADEMY:
Today we are used to calling the fête galante a pictorial genre, but the evidence for this is surprisingly complicated. Watteau was the inventor of the fête galante, the modernizer of the Arcadian tradition in French painting. But contrary to a long-standing conviction, he was accepted by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1717 as a history painter when he handed in his most famous fête galante, Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère) (see fig. 32, p. 45).5 According to contemporary terminology, a history painter was understood to be able to cover all aspects of painting and to master the depiction of the human figure, actions, and passions. Watteau’s paintings are remarkably void of both action and the passions, but his rank as a full member indicates the high respect his art enjoyed. When Pater became a member of the Academy in 1728, the situation had changed. He was accepted as the second painter, after Nicolas Lancret, “dans le talent particulier des fêtes galantes” (“in the specialty of fêtes galantes”), a title that put him in a lower rank by describing the main part of his output as a more limited specialty.6 Ironically, we would not necessarily call his reception piece a fête galante. The term had been used by the Academy for the first time in connection with Watteau (as a title of his reception piece, not as a general description of his work), and it is obvious that Pater’s fellow Academicians saw him in direct relationship, if inferior in status, to his recently deceased model.
Excerpt from
Christoph Martin Vogtherr, "Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fête Galante," 81-94, in French Art of the Eighteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Full General Description:
This pair of paintings is a testament to the subtlety of Pater's art at its finest. Although obviously indebted to his mentor, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Pater's own sense of design and poetry lend these works the kind of luminescence and languorous grace for which he was so prized by collectors. The two canvases were conceived as pendants and are conventional in their evocation of the seasonal pairing of the activities of fall and spring. The harvesting of grapes is a typical activity of autumn, while outdoor bathing belongs to the warmth of springtime. However, Pater's thematic pairing also alludes to the mythological association of Bacchus and Venus. Bacchus, the God of wine is symbolically present in the form of the sculpted putti, one of which holds a sheaf of wheat. A Greek herm at the far right of the composition oversees this updated celebration ofthe feast of Bacchus. As we study the multiple pairs of couples arranged across the composition, a more sinister element emerges. The couple seated on the ground at center is actually struggling against each other, as the woman tries to pull away from her too aggressive lover. His near twin, in a red vest to the far right is about to pelt his competitor with an apple, while on the opposite side, a leering man dressed in theatrical cape and hat stares hungrily at the bosom of the young girl, kneeling at his feet. This outdoor party, it seems, is on the verge of erupting into the violent excesses of the followers of Bacchus, who are traditionally represented in a mad frenzy of lust and drunken revelry. The aegis of Bacchus is also present in Nymphs Bathing, though in a less menacing way, again through a sculptural group ofputti, one of which is mounting a she-goat. One attendant washes the feet of a modern-day Venus, while her companions, all in various states of undress, rise up in alarm at the young peeping Toms they have discovered hidden in the bushes.
Pater was the only official pupil of Watteau. Like Watteau, he was a native of Valenciennes. He must have followed Watteau to Paris after the latter's short stay in Valenciennes in 1710. Although Watteau is said to have mistreated his young disciple, cutting short his apprenticeship out of bad temper, he is also believed to have relented towards the end of his life. In 1721 the dying Watteau called his once rejected student to his side, so that he might impart to him the secrets of his art. When Watteau died, Pater 'finished' his master's last paintings. Quickly thereafter, he became the favorite of many of Watteau's wealthiest patrons, including Frederick the Great, who owned some fifty of his most beautiful canvases. Pater enjoyed a prosperous career, only falling into neglect with the fall of the ancien regime, with which his elegant art was inevitably identified.
Excerpt from
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 17-18.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Place of origin: France (nation): TGN: 1000070
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1730-1733
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
Lent by the Micheal L. Rosenberg Foundation
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254297994: UMO Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fete Galante After the Detah of Antoine Watteau
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