Claude-Henri Watelet
Encyclopedia
Claude-Henri Watelet was a rich French fermier-général who was an amateur painter, a well-respected etcher
, a writer on the arts and a connoisseur of gardens. Watelet's inherited privilege of farming taxes in the Orléanais
left him free to pursue his avocations, art and literature and gardens. His Essai sur les jardins, 1774, firmly founded on English ideas expressed by Thomas Whately
, introduced the English landscape garden to France, as the jardin Anglois. The sociable Watelet, who was born and died in Paris, was at the center of the French art world of his time.
He kept house in Paris in the rue Charlot and attended the Monday salons
of Mme Geoffrin, where he would have seen La Live de Jully, who engraved one of Watelet's drawings and who, like Watelet, was an early patron of Greuze
. Watelet was received as an honorary associate of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1754, at the same time as Bergeret de Grandcourt, another collector and connoisseur whose avocations were supported by the Ferme Générale.
In 1760 he was elected to the Académie française
on the strength of his didactic poem L'Art de peindre. The poem is composed in four chants devoted in turn to Design, Colour, Picturesque Invention and Poetic Invention. It is followed by precepts in prose on Proportions, Ensemble, Balance or Weight and Movement of the figures, Beauty, Grace, Harmony of Light and Colours, Effects, and the Expression of the Passions. The second half of the work was decorated with his illustrative engravings and vignettes, for was a talented etcher: Denis Diderot
said that if he had a copy of Watelet's poem L'Art de peindre he would cut out the illustrations and frame them under glass, and throw the rest in the fire.
An expanded version of the essays furnished the basis of Watelet's unfinished dictionary of the fine arts.
About this time Watelet embarked on a lifelong affair with the pastellist Marguerite Le Comte, a young married woman whom he had been teaching the technique of etching. With her and his old tutor the abbé Copette of the Sorbonne
he made a second Italian tour, 1763–64. In Rome, two pensionnaires of the French Academy in Rome
assembled a complimentary collection of poems by Luigi Subleyras, titled Nella venuta in Roma di madama le Comte e dei signori Watelet e Copette, which commemorates their visit in 1764; it is illustrated with etchings, mostly by Etienne de la Vallée-Poussin, and Franz Edmund Weirotter and Hubert Robert
, whose own suite of ten etchings Les Soirées de Rome, produced at the same time, was dedicated to Mme Le Conte. Winckelmann
took them to view the antiquities at the Villa Albani
In the Essai sur les Jardins, Watelet's experience of the Physiocrats
informed his bucolic vision of a France that might be able to return to a simple agrarian economy based upon idealized models of the family-owned farm. He declared his devotion to the philosophy of Rousseau
in the opening pages of his garden treatise, which gave a detailed account of the laying out of a ferme ornée
, such as the English poet William Shenstone
had pioneered at The Leasowes
, begun in 1743.
Watelet had preceded his essay with his own experiments in gardening on an island in the River Seine that he owned, at Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine
); there between 1754 and 1772 he created a "picturesque setting unique in French gardens at the time it was created," according to William Howard Adams. His Moulin Joly ("Pretty Mill") offered a residence, a farm, stables, a dairy, an apiary, a mill, walks, rides and vistas ornamented with sculpture, a flower garden and a physic garden, with a medical laboratory and an infirmary, uniting the beautiful with the useful. The inspiration for the new sensibility for an atmospheric garden – which a plan of the Moulin Joly shows to have had perfectly straight rides through the woods, is generally credited to the vision of painters in the generation of Watteau, who painted in the now-overgrown gardens laid out in the previous century. Watelin's inspiration may have come in part through his friend Boucher. In the 1740s Jean Baptiste Oudry had access to the overgrown gardens of the prince de Guise at Arcueil and often brought younger artists to sketch with him in the neglected grounds; Boucher accompanied him on several occasions.
Though his friendship with the painter François Boucher
, and his art lessons in Italy with Hubert Robert
during his youthful tour
, the influences of Boucher and "Robert-les-ruines" were directly transferred to the new French gardens in the genre pittoresque. In 1780 the visionary neoclassical architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières
dedicated to Watelet Le génie de l'architecture, ou L'analogie de cet art avec nos sensations ("The Genius of Architecture, or the Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations").
Watelet's treatise appeared in the same year that Marie Antoinette
's gardens round the Petit Trianon
began to be remodelled; by 1783 two sides of the pavilion looked onto small glades of lawn encircled by sweeps and clumps of trees, and her petit hameau
was finished, like a stage set for a pastorale
, reflecting itself at the far end of a little lake no larger than a village pond.
In Greuze's portrait (illustrated above), Watelet is shown with calipers in hand and a bronze reduction of the Venus de' Medici
on his bureau plat
, as if in the process of determining the secret of perfect proportions of the female body. Watelet wrote articles for the Encyclopédie
on painting and engraving
, contributed to a volume of lives of the successive holders of the post of premier peintre du roi since Charles Le Brun
(1752) and worked on a projected Dictionaire des beaux-arts; increasing feebleness and exhaustion overcame his efforts, and the work was completed and published after his death.
To indulge his interest in the stage he wrote a number of comedies and short pastoral dramas, listed below. Two of them appear to have been performed, one to a select company at Choisy
.
Etching
Etching is the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio in the metal...
, a writer on the arts and a connoisseur of gardens. Watelet's inherited privilege of farming taxes in the Orléanais
Orléanais
Orléanais is a former province of France, around the cities of Orléans, Chartres, and Blois.The name comes from Orléans, its main city and traditional capital. The province was one of those into which France was divided before the French Revolution...
left him free to pursue his avocations, art and literature and gardens. His Essai sur les jardins, 1774, firmly founded on English ideas expressed by Thomas Whately
Thomas Whately
Thomas Whately , an English politician and writer, was a Member of Parliament , who served as Commissioner on the Board of Trade, as Secretary to the Treasury under Lord Grenville, and as Under- secretary of State under Lord North . As an M.P...
, introduced the English landscape garden to France, as the jardin Anglois. The sociable Watelet, who was born and died in Paris, was at the center of the French art world of his time.
He kept house in Paris in the rue Charlot and attended the Monday salons
Salon (gathering)
A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...
of Mme Geoffrin, where he would have seen La Live de Jully, who engraved one of Watelet's drawings and who, like Watelet, was an early patron of Greuze
Jean-Baptiste Greuze
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter.-Early life:He was born at Tournus, Saône-et-Loire. He is generally said to have formed his own talent; this is, however, true only in the most limited sense, for at an early age his inclinations, though thwarted by his father, were encouraged by a...
. Watelet was received as an honorary associate of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1754, at the same time as Bergeret de Grandcourt, another collector and connoisseur whose avocations were supported by the Ferme Générale.
In 1760 he was elected to the Académie française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
on the strength of his didactic poem L'Art de peindre. The poem is composed in four chants devoted in turn to Design, Colour, Picturesque Invention and Poetic Invention. It is followed by precepts in prose on Proportions, Ensemble, Balance or Weight and Movement of the figures, Beauty, Grace, Harmony of Light and Colours, Effects, and the Expression of the Passions. The second half of the work was decorated with his illustrative engravings and vignettes, for was a talented etcher: Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
said that if he had a copy of Watelet's poem L'Art de peindre he would cut out the illustrations and frame them under glass, and throw the rest in the fire.
An expanded version of the essays furnished the basis of Watelet's unfinished dictionary of the fine arts.
About this time Watelet embarked on a lifelong affair with the pastellist Marguerite Le Comte, a young married woman whom he had been teaching the technique of etching. With her and his old tutor the abbé Copette of the Sorbonne
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
he made a second Italian tour, 1763–64. In Rome, two pensionnaires of the French Academy in Rome
French Academy in Rome
The French Academy in Rome is an Academy located in the Villa Medici, within the Villa Borghese, on the Pincio in Rome, Italy.-History:...
assembled a complimentary collection of poems by Luigi Subleyras, titled Nella venuta in Roma di madama le Comte e dei signori Watelet e Copette, which commemorates their visit in 1764; it is illustrated with etchings, mostly by Etienne de la Vallée-Poussin, and Franz Edmund Weirotter and Hubert Robert
Hubert Robert
Hubert Robert , French artist, was born in Paris.His father, Nicolas Robert, was in the service of François-Joseph de Choiseul, marquis de Stainville a leading diplomat from Lorraine...
, whose own suite of ten etchings Les Soirées de Rome, produced at the same time, was dedicated to Mme Le Conte. Winckelmann
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art...
took them to view the antiquities at the Villa Albani
In the Essai sur les Jardins, Watelet's experience of the Physiocrats
Physiocrats
Physiocracy is an economic theory developed by the Physiocrats, a group of economists who believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of "land agriculture" or "land development." Their theories originated in France and were most popular during the second half of the 18th...
informed his bucolic vision of a France that might be able to return to a simple agrarian economy based upon idealized models of the family-owned farm. He declared his devotion to the philosophy of Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18th-century Romanticism. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought.His novel Émile: or, On Education is a treatise...
in the opening pages of his garden treatise, which gave a detailed account of the laying out of a ferme ornée
Ferme ornée
The term ferme ornée as used in English garden history derives from Stephen Switzer's term for 'ornamented farm'. It describes a country estate laid out partly according to aesthetic principles and partly for farming. During the eighteenth century the original ferme ornée was Woburn Farm, made by...
, such as the English poet William Shenstone
William Shenstone
William Shenstone was an English poet and one of the earliest practitioners of landscape gardening through the development of his estate, The Leasowes.-Life:...
had pioneered at The Leasowes
The Leasowes
The Leasowes is a 57 hectare estate in Halesowen, historically in the county of Shropshire, England, comprising house and gardens....
, begun in 1743.
Watelet had preceded his essay with his own experiments in gardening on an island in the River Seine that he owned, at Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine
Hauts-de-Seine
Hauts-de-Seine is designated number 92 of the 101 départements in France. It is part of the Île-de-France region, and covers the western inner suburbs of Paris...
); there between 1754 and 1772 he created a "picturesque setting unique in French gardens at the time it was created," according to William Howard Adams. His Moulin Joly ("Pretty Mill") offered a residence, a farm, stables, a dairy, an apiary, a mill, walks, rides and vistas ornamented with sculpture, a flower garden and a physic garden, with a medical laboratory and an infirmary, uniting the beautiful with the useful. The inspiration for the new sensibility for an atmospheric garden – which a plan of the Moulin Joly shows to have had perfectly straight rides through the woods, is generally credited to the vision of painters in the generation of Watteau, who painted in the now-overgrown gardens laid out in the previous century. Watelin's inspiration may have come in part through his friend Boucher. In the 1740s Jean Baptiste Oudry had access to the overgrown gardens of the prince de Guise at Arcueil and often brought younger artists to sketch with him in the neglected grounds; Boucher accompanied him on several occasions.
Though his friendship with the painter François Boucher
François Boucher
François Boucher was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture...
, and his art lessons in Italy with Hubert Robert
Hubert Robert
Hubert Robert , French artist, was born in Paris.His father, Nicolas Robert, was in the service of François-Joseph de Choiseul, marquis de Stainville a leading diplomat from Lorraine...
during his youthful tour
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transit in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage...
, the influences of Boucher and "Robert-les-ruines" were directly transferred to the new French gardens in the genre pittoresque. In 1780 the visionary neoclassical architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières
Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières
Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières was a French architect and theoretician. He was born and died in Paris. He published several works on architectural and related subjects, including Architecture of Expression, and The Theatre of Desire at the End of the Ancien Régime; Or, The Analogy of Fiction with...
dedicated to Watelet Le génie de l'architecture, ou L'analogie de cet art avec nos sensations ("The Genius of Architecture, or the Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations").
Watelet's treatise appeared in the same year that Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette ; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was an Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France and of Navarre. She was the fifteenth and penultimate child of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I....
's gardens round the Petit Trianon
Petit Trianon
The Petit Trianon is a small château located on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in Versailles, France.-Design and construction:...
began to be remodelled; by 1783 two sides of the pavilion looked onto small glades of lawn encircled by sweeps and clumps of trees, and her petit hameau
Petit hameau
The Hameau de la Reine |Hamlet]]) is a rustic retreat in the park of the Château de Versailles built for Marie Antoinette between 1785 and 1792 near the Petit Trianon in the Yvelines, France...
was finished, like a stage set for a pastorale
Pastorale
For Beethoven's Pastoral symphony, see Symphony No. 6 Pastorale refers to something of a pastoral nature in music, whether in form or in mood....
, reflecting itself at the far end of a little lake no larger than a village pond.
In Greuze's portrait (illustrated above), Watelet is shown with calipers in hand and a bronze reduction of the Venus de' Medici
Venus de' Medici
The Venus de' Medici or Medici Venus is a lifesize Hellenistic marble sculpture depicting the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite. It is a 1st century BC marble copy, perhaps made in Athens, of a bronze original Greek sculpture, following the type of the Aphrodite of Cnidos, which would have been made...
on his bureau plat
Writing table
A writing table has a series of drawers directly under the surface of the table, to contain writing implements, so that it may serve as a desk...
, as if in the process of determining the secret of perfect proportions of the female body. Watelet wrote articles for the Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers was a general encyclopedia published in France between 1751 and 1772, with later supplements, revised editions, and translations. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert...
on painting and engraving
Engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
, contributed to a volume of lives of the successive holders of the post of premier peintre du roi since Charles Le Brun
Charles Le Brun
Charles Le Brun , a French painter and art theorist, became the all-powerful, peerless master of 17th-century French art.-Biography:-Early life and training:...
(1752) and worked on a projected Dictionaire des beaux-arts; increasing feebleness and exhaustion overcame his efforts, and the work was completed and published after his death.
To indulge his interest in the stage he wrote a number of comedies and short pastoral dramas, listed below. Two of them appear to have been performed, one to a select company at Choisy
Château de Choisy
The Château de Choisy was a sometime royal French residence in the commune of Choisy-le-Roi in the Val-de-Marne département, not far from Paris...
.
In the arts
- Encyclopédie, "Gravure", vol. 7 (1757)
- Contributions to Vies des premiers peintres du roi, depuis M. Le Brun jusqu'à présent (1752).
- L'Art de peindre, poème, avec des réflexions sur les différentes parties de la peinture (1760). (on-line text)
- Essai sur les jardins (1774). RRprinted (Gérard Monfort), 2004. (on-line text)
- Dictionnaire des beaux-arts (2 volumes, 1788-91). Watelet's work was completed by Pierre-Charles Lévesque and others (On-line text at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k82596b and http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k82597p. The dictionary was re-edited in 5 volumes as Dictionnaire de arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure in 1792. Facsimile edition: L. F. Prault, Paris /Minkoff, Genève, 1972.
- Rymbranesques ou Essais de gravures (1783). Album of engravings by Rembrandt and by Watelet. From 1767 Rembrandt's copper etching plates were preserved in Watelet's collection. This album stands at the head of a tradition of modern restrikes of the Rembrandt etchings:
For the theatre
- La Maison de campagne à la mode, ou La comédie d'après nature, comédie en deux actes, en prose, composée en 1777 (1784). "The fashionable country house, or a comedy from the life" (on-line text)
- Recueil de quelques ouvrages de M. Watelet, de l'Académie françoise et de celle de peinture (1784).
- Silvie
- Zénéïde, en 1 acte, en prose, composée en janvier 1743
- Les Statuaires d'Athènes, comédie en 3 actes en prose, composée en 1766 **Les Veuves, ou la Matrône d'Éphèse, comédie en 3 actes, en vers
- Milon, intermède pastoral en 1 acte en vers
- Deucalion et Pyrrha, opéra à grand spectacle, en 4 actes en vers, composé en 1765, exécuté au concert des écoles gratuites de dessin, le 29 avril 1772, dans la salle du Wauxhall de la foire St-Germain. (On-line text)].
- Délie, drame lyrique en 1 acte en vers, composé en 1765
- Phaon, drame lyrique en 2 actes en vers mêlé d'ariettes, représenté devant Leurs Majestés à Choisy en septembre 1778.
Further reading
- Wiebenson, Dora, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton University Press) 1978.