Watteau was unusual for his time in that he did not compose his paintings organically by sketching an ensemble but rather by using a stock of drawings he kept in bound volumes, picking and mixing figures and poses rather like adding pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. According to an eye-witness: "He owned some fancy costumes[...]in which he dressed people of either sex[...]and he drew people in attitudes as nature presented them, much preferring simpler attitudes to any others." When he wanted to paint a picture — for example the large Fête galante in a wooded landscape, 1719-21, in the Wallace Collection exhibition (surely the prototype for Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe)— he would draw the parkland setting and turn to his books of drawings, selecting, say, a cavalier with his back turned, a seated girl in rose silk or a lounging, satiny swain to dot between the trees.
This very literal sense of composition is both a strength and a weakness: it gives his paintings a certain staginess because the groupings are not taken from life, so figures can overlap uncomfortably, space collapse and eye-lines miss, but it also gives them a narrative ambiguity. What story was Watteau suggesting as he played puppeteer? What can these figures be saying to one another if they appear again, unaltered, with different partners in different pictures? Do these pictures describe the random and fleeting nature of love or its universality? Does this choreographed flirtatiousness represent a state of grace, the perfection of luxe, calme et volupté? Whatever Watteau's intention — if indeed he had one — his are mood pieces, as heady and rich with possibilities as the costume party in the Alain-Fournier novel, Le Grand Meaulnes.
The 10 choice paintings in the Wallace Collection show and its attendant exhibition of works belonging to Jean de Julienne, the collector and connoisseur who championed Watteau and spread his fame through a comprehensive set of engravings, open the door on the refined world of Watteau's milieu but it is the drawings at the Royal Academy that best encapsulate his brilliance.
Many of the sheets on display are small slices of perfection, showing his consummate mastery of the trois crayons technique. He used red, black and white chalks to suggest not just form but volume, texture and colour, with subtle changes of pressure on the pencil turning a line from crisp to soft, and using hatchings and smudgings to shepherd the eye from a face to a fabric to a gesture. Some sheets were reused, with extra figures added years after the originals, and some revived — as in a page showing three heads of a young girl which clearly didn't satisfy him so he quickly added a black mob cap at a later date.
