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 dissi-
pated 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 sub-
jective apprehension, for the spectator.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen
u
ber die Asthetik 1
For the perfect fl^
a neur, for the passionate spectator, it is
an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multi-
tude, 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 reverieI am, I realize, trotting
out an old warhorse. Watteau paints a dream in which there
is nothing to do but listen to ones heart and leave free utter-
ances to ones mood, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt pro-
claim in L art du XVIIIe sie cle, and they have hardly been
alone in thinking so.3 Ren e Huyghe, for example, declares
that, with Watteau, painting is no longer something to be
understood, but something only to be felt, to be dreamed
[r^e ve ].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 Watteaus 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. Rev-
erie 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, Brysons dis-
cussion links the production of reverie to the artists subver-
sion of pictorial narrative. Refusing a one-to-one relation
between the painterly signifier and a fixed linguistic signi-
fied, Watteau presents the viewer with a semantic vacuum:
backs are turned, faces obscured, costumes fantastic, and ges-
tures enigmaticeverything is rendered illegible at the same
time that it demands interpretation. The antinarrativity of
Watteaus 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, Bry-
son designates as the literary form of reverie.6
Brysons insights are revelatory, but his structuralist frame-
work fails to historicize Watteaus enterprise properly. First,
although his observation about the incommensurability of
word and image in Watteaus work is well taken, Bryson
assumes the relation between the two is its defining charac-
teristic. 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 periods art discourse must there-
fore 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 Watteaus paintings
persuades still, but the Goncourts highly subjective mode of
ekphrasis is itself historically conditioned and foreign to
Watteaus 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 Wat-
teau was painting. Understood historically, reverie in Wat-
teau 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
Watteaus 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 encom-
passes 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 dis-
courses of the Grand Si ecle.9 With de Piless theories as my
point of departure, my approach emphasizes the material
and formal qualities of Watteaus paintingsnot 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 art-
ist engaged, more deeply than any painter of his generation,
with new kinds of subjective and cultural experienceas 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, 161617, oil on
canvas, 83 84 in. (212 214.5 cm). Alte Pinakothek, est deception was its ability to approximate human flesh, to
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 parti-
sans of dessein; rejected the notion that paintings 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, com-
plained 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 pro-
moted. 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 sur-
prised spectator must go to her, as if to enter into conversa-
tion with figures she represents.16 It solicited viewers,
beckoning them with its physical, even carnal, delights. Pow-
erless to resist, the spectator was meant nothing less than to
fall in love.17
At the heart of colors 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 colors great-
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 artists 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 fore-
ground 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 [ve ritables] that one could easily imagine
that if one held her hand one would feel the heat of her
blood.20 Rubens fulfilled paintings 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 cho-
sen, if they are not well distributed, he stated, the composi-
tion will never satisfy the disinterested spectator, and will
never enjoy general approbation.22 Proper disposition
demanded that the paintings 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 painters 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

imposing harmony and hierarchy on the order of the world,
the tout ensemble offered spectators an irresistible simulacrum
of lived experience.26 It intensified colors illusionism and,
improving on nature itself, could even make the painted
objects more true . . . than the actual [ve ritables] ones.27
Painting could now claim precedence over the real, and de
Piles could assert, against the old guards 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 colors seductive illusions joined with the tout
ensembles 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 engen-
dered in the spectator by paintings overall visual and mate-
rial effect.31 It described an experience of overwhelming
power, when painting transports the mind to a state of admi-
ration 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 Boileaus trans-
lation of Longinuss Peri hupsous in 1674, the Traite du sub-
lime, ou du merveilleux dans le discours.33 By its nature, the
sublime thwarts any attempt to define it, but most commenta-
tors of the Grand Si ecle, Boileau chief among them, agreed
that it designated an overwhelming affective response to lan-
guage. 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
Piless attempt to find an equivalent to the sublime, a literary
concept, that was proper to painting.36 It shared with the sub-
lime 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 specta-
tors 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 sub-
jects who held a paintings hermeneutic key, enthousiasme flat-
tened the field of spectatorship. King and commoner alike
could not resist paintings sensual jolt, a violent attraction
that overwhelmed any resistance. True painting, de Piles
proclaimed, is that which calls to us (so to speak) by surpris-
ing 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.
Watteaus 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 academys
conseiller honoraire (honorary adviser) in 1699 and had taken
his place as Frances leading art theorist. He published his
theoretical summa, the Cours de peinture par principe, in 1708,
which went on to become the centurys most influential and
republished work of French art theory. Watteaus style, with
WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 321
its painterly brushwork and warm palette, betrays the unmis-
takable influence of the colorists ascent, and his extensive
copying after Titian and especially Rubens indicates the
extent to which he must have absorbed de Piless lessons. It is
likely, in fact, that Watteau knew de Piles and would have dis-
cussed 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 artists
friendship with the painter Charles de La Fosse (16361716),
another client of Crozat and the leading colorist of his gener-
ation, as well as his increasing involvement with the academy
around 1708 would have further exposed him to de Piless
theories.40 On the face of it, then, Watteau appears to be an
exemplary colorist, unproblematically de Pileanand 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 galantesnot all, but a significant number of
themhe turns away from the twin poles of the theorists sys-
tem: the illusionistic body and the tout ensemble.42 Watteaus
invitation to reverie must be understood in light of these
subversions.43
L assemble e dans un parc (Fig. 2), one of the finest f e^tes gal-
antes, gives a good idea of the artists 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 cos-
tumes, they appear, like opalescent fireflies, as patches of
brilliant pastels sparkling against the muted tones of the fore-
ground. Rubenss much larger Garden of Love (Fig. 3), a clear
forerunner of the f e^te galante, which Watteau knew and bor-
rowed from frequently,44 could not provide a more vivid con-
trast. 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
Piless remarks on fabric, what they cover, principally the
nude bodies of the figures.45 Watteaus painting derives
much from Rubenss: its vivid coloring and energetic brush-
work; 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 Rubenss 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 artists miniature dolls,
lost in the folds of glistening silks, pulsate with life and radi-
ate physical presence. Watteau has divested the body of its
privileged position as the fulcrum of paintings supersession
of the real, denying the erotic thrill of paint-as-flesh. The art-
ist who devoted so much energy to studying and copying
Rubenss work has turned his masters model on its head.46
Watteaus departures from Rubenss example were not lost
on his contemporaries. As the comte de Caylus, the artists
friend, complained in a 1748 lecture at the Royal Academy,
Watteaus 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 nudewhich we know to be
patently untruehe 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
Watteaus 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, exhib-
its 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 artists death. Watteau
could be a model colorist when he wanted. He could offer the
kind of erotic gratification promised by Rubenss 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
picturesfor example, in Divertissements champ^ e tres (Fig. 5),
2 Jean-Antoine Watteau, L assemble e
dans un parc, ca. 171617, oil on panel,
12 18 in. (32.5 46.5 cm).
Musee 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. 163334, oil on canvas, 78
113 in. (199 286 cm). Museo del
Prado, Madrid (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Erich Lessing,
provided by Art Resource, NY)
 e esthey 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 pro-
portions, Watteau seems to use the gray flesh of his statues to
compound the real figures lack of heat and blood and pres-
ence. Especially when considering an artist who Caylus also
maintained thought profoundly about painting, we would
do well to consider that Watteaus 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 Watteaus insistent
revelation of the material support of representation. Where
for de Piles the brushstroke served primarily as a vehicle for

4 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Nymphe et satyre, ca. 171516, oil on
panel, 29 42 in. (73.5 107.5 cm). Musee 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 artists feathery, gossa-
mer brushstrokes can yield pleasures independent of what
they represent. Fabric, in particular, emerges as the privi-
leged site in which painting loses its capacity to supersede
reality with illusion. In L assemble 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 illusion-
ism. 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. 171921, oil on canvas,
50 75 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)
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
The dialectic between Rubenss flesh and Watteaus fabrics
lies at the heart of Watteaus subversions of de Piless theo-
ries. Created by human hands to conceal, adorn, and civilize
the natural body, fabric serves as a synecdoche for the artifici-
ality 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 fabrics 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 paintings capacity to simu-
late presence, de Piles also appreciated the pleasures of brush-
work, 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 agi-
tated, 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
Watteaus pinceau, especially in his handling of cloth, exhib-
its the kind of freedom, swiftness, and lightness appreciated
by de Piles. Caylus himself praised Watteaus touch, fine
and light, [which] gave his execution a piquant and ani-
mated air.52
Nonetheless, de Piless admiration for the pinceau came
with a caveat. The pleasures of the brushwork and close look-
ing were reserved for connoisseurs, experts in artistic tech-
nique, 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
6 Charles de La Fosse, Bacchus et Ariane, 1699, oil on canvas,
95 72 in. (242 185 cm). Musee des Beaux-Arts, Dijon
(artwork in the public domain; photograph RMN-Grand
Palais, provided by Art Resource, NY)
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 arti-
fice. For there is no painting that does not have its proper
distance from which it should be seen.53
The viewer who wishes to participate in the game of illusion
that is paintings charge must play by the games 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 Paint-
ing, seen from the point where flesh dissolves into pigment,
loses its properly visual powers and pleasures, loses its poten-
tial for tromperie.55 It lays bare what Georges Didi-Huberman
calls the aporia of the detail, the moment when the materi-
ality of the painters mark exposes itself to the spectators 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 tyr-
anny of matter.56 The tyranny of matter, the latent non-
meaning in paintings material base, in fact weighed heavily
on colors 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
mind. He cautioned, [Dessein] is always the pole and com-
pass that orients us in this study [of painting], so that we are
not submerged in the ocean of color, where many drown try-
ing 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 artists touch to that of
flesha 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 Bruns 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 Watteaus contemporaries essayed comparable
effects, at least not to the same degree. La Fosse, for instance,
borrowed almost as frequently from Rubens, yet his paint-
ings, like Bacchus et Ariane (Fig. 6), hew closely to the kind of
Rubensian illusionism admired by de Piles. Watteaus bor-
rowings, 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 amo-
rous couples flirting in Arcadian landscapes, but the insistent
incompleteness of Watteaus pinceau precludes erotic recog-
nition 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 pig-
ment, Watteaus trace represents only the condition of half-
effaced presence itself, installing a small but unbreachable
distance between painting and beholder. For the artists
contemporaries, the experience of looking could no longer
be defined by ineluctable seduction. Watteau had chipped
away at paintings dominion over the eye.
The Center Cannot Hold: Watteaus 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 Piless friend
Antoine Coypel (16611722), 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 Dianas pearly flesh.62 De Piless 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 Rubenss Garden of
 WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 325

7 Antoine Coypel, Le repos de Diane, oil

on canvas, ca. 1695, 35 48 in. (90
122 cm). Musee Departemental dArt

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 Piless chief con-
cern, 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 hap-
pens when the tout ensemble is not observed. If . . . you sepa-
rate 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 rest-

less; it can even cause pain. The tout ensemble could ensure
paintings 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 Piless
model and experiment with new compositional arrange-
ments. In paintings like Divertissements champ^ e tres (Fig. 5) and
Re 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 Piless convex mirror inside out and
pushing the figures around the peripheries of the composi-
tion. 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
10 Nicolas Lancret, Repos de chasse, ca. 173540, oil on canvas,
24 29 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 paintings forms are distributed around an
empty center. If Watteau had followed de Piless 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 paintings other ele-
mentsto the womens shimmering yellow, blue, and pink
garments, to the horses, and up to the delicate foliage of the
trees. He does something similar in L assemblee 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
9 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Le rendez-vous
de chasse, ca. 171718, oil on canvas, 49
74 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)
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 Assemble e pre 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 curv-
ing branches around them, generate similar competing cen-
ters of attention. In all of these examples, Watteau mobilizes
landscape and figure to contravene, with remarkable bold-
ness, the guiding logic of the tout ensemble.65 Rejecting de
Piless imperative to fix the eye, he sets it in motion.66
Watteaus 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 pe lerinage a l^ le de Cythe 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
Titians landscapes typically provide a compositional foil for
a Venus or Diana or some other erotic spectacle, Watteaus
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 composi-
tion, the eye circles around the paintings 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 treeand from there, repeating its route or per-
haps reversing course. In the second version (Fig. 14), Wat-
teau 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, extend-
ing the line of figures upward like the jet of a fountain; and
the ship sports a towering mast, reinforcing the upward
thrust of the puttis flight and leading the eye back to the
tree. The pilgrims, too, are more individuated, conspicuous,
and numerous than before. Scattered, like an exploded fire-
work, across the canvas in vibrant pinks, yellows, and blues,
 WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 327

11 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Assemble e pre s

de la fontaine de Neptune, ca. 171213,
oil on canvas, 18 22 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, 171821, oil on panel, 19
25 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 cen-
ter, the ethereal mountains and the autumnal haze that sur-
rounds 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 pe lerinage a l^ le de Cythe re, ca. 1717, oil on canvas, 50 76 in. (129 194 cm). Mus
(artwork in the public domain; photograph by Scala, provided by Art Resource, NY)
closure forestalled formally, the spectators 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 Rubenss lovers in the
Garden of Love, in the thrall of pleasures eternal present,
blissfully unconscious of times progress. In the spectators
restless gaze, they are set in a perpetual dance, forever
wavering between their longing for the past or the future.70
Their destinationthe consummation of love, the satisfac-
tion of desireremains out of reach.
In an important sense, Cythera, Venuss island of plenary
pleasures, is out of reach for the spectator as well. De Piless
system promised the attainment of Cythera: enthousiasme, the
acme of paintings powers, could transport the spectator to a
state of boundless sensual gratification. But by repudiating
colors illusionism and the tout ensembles magnetic harmo-
nies, by refusing to fix the eye at the center of the composi-
tion, 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 eyes freedom
to wander and range and roam. Cythe res pilgrims may be
ee du Louvre, Paris
denied their destination, but they herald a new order of
visual pleasure.
Galanterie and Reverie
Watteaus rejection of enthousiasme and his search for new,
more insinuating pictorial effects must be understood in rela-
tion to the larger cultural phenomenon of galanterie. Today,
we tend to think of galanterie almost exclusively in connection
with the subject matter of Watteaus f e^tes galantesthe ele-
gant and amorous encounters of aristocrats in Arcadian park-
landsor 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 cul-
tural 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 dou-
ceur, 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 expres-
sions of galanterie. The artist, he writes, seems to have syn-
thesized an entire swath of the expansion of galanterie by
introducing it into a new space, pictorial art, where the

14 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Le pe lerinage a l^ le de Cythe re, ca. 171819, oil on canvas, 50 76 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 nnete , 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 eigh-
teenth centuries.73 Vialas expanded conception of the term
goes further, inviting us to understand Watteaus pictorial
effects in relation to a larger field of aesthetic debates.74 I am
thinking in particular of the galant reaction to Boileaus
translation of Longinuss Traite du sublime, the key source for
de Piless 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 reasons com-
pass. Yet they rejected the sublimes aesthetic of ravish-
ment, 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 ones 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
WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 329
(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 [beaute s farde 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 de licatesse.79 All conveyed, to
one extent or another, the goal to insinuate rather than
force,80 but as concepts, the je ne sais quoi, gr^ a ce, and charme
predate the publication of Longinus-Boileaus Traite du sub-
lime and accommodated a variety of effects, notoriously
ambiguous and not always easy to distinguish from the sub-
lime.81 De licatesse, on the other hand, arose as an explicit
alternative to the sublimes violence, even as a critique of it.82
Theorized by Bouhours in his treatise La manie re de bien penser
dans les ouvrages d esprit of 1687, de licatesse epitomized the gal-
ant 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 de 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 sublimes immediacy for an almost imper-
ceptible attraction, its ravishment for subtle, even fleeting
charms, de licatesse captures, in period-specific language, the
pictorial effects generated by Watteaus 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 de 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 lookingsometimes up
close to admire the pinceau, sometimes further back to follow
the curving line of figures around the compositionto enter
their world.
De licatesse, however, does not provide an entirely satisfac-
tory alternative to enthousiasme. Unlike enthousiasme, it regis-
ters 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 engen-
dered by that restlessness. Reverie, in ways previously unex-
plored, 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, reveries
current meaningthe Dictionnaire de l Acade mie of 1694
defines it as thought in which the imagination is allowed to
wanderhad 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 articula-
tion of a new mode of thought and feeling that came to
occupy a central place in the periods cultural imagination.87
Encapsulating the subtle, irrational, de licat charms of reflec-
tion 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 Cle lie, Madeleine de Scud ery, the Grand Si ecles
great champion of reverie, affirmed that reverie belongs to
those with a tender heart and that, in order to enter into rev-
erie, you must have something in your soul that does not dis-
please.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 ere
asserted. The first enhances his memory; the second pol-
ishes 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 domi-
nance of de Piless aesthetic of ravishment.91 In fact, as direc-
tor of the Royal Academy, Antoine Coypel promoted reverie
as a vital element of aesthetic experience. In a lecture deliv-
ered to the academy in 1720 entitled Sur lexcellence 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, cele-
brated equally in the sciences and the arts, say while he was
standing before a painting which he was looking at atten-
tively: it must be very beautiful, because it makes me dream
e ver] and dream agreeably.93
[r^
Watteaus paintings in particular lent themselves to this
kind of reflection, and it is not improbable that Coypel, who
admired the artists 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 pri-
vate spaces of a cabinet or boudoir.95 They invited close look-
ing, pleasure in the inspection of each trace of the artists
brush, and are thus linked with the rise of a new kind of spec-
tator: 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 inge-
nious thoughts, by variety and propriety [biense ances].97 The
amateur did not require erudition, only the galant hommes
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 plea-
sure gentler and sweeter [espe ce de volupte plus douce], for
those who are capable of feeling it, than the agitated, tumul-
tuous 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 rev-
erie with remarkable frequencywe need only think, among
many others, of Mezzetins dreamy gaze as he strums his gui-
tar (Fig. 15), or l amante inquie tes distracted absorption as
she tugs at her dress, or, most famously, Pierrots enigmatic
withdrawal contrasted against the fatuous looks of the other
actors and the ass at his feet. Watteaus 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 privi-
leged territory of reverie.100 Even the artists subjects, elegant
and idealized, with their enigmatic gestures, fantastic cos-
tumes, and amorous attitudes, are the stuff of a lovers day-
dream. 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 verieand the verb
from which it comes, r^ e vercarried a different set of mean-
ings than they did by the end of the century. Fr ed
eric God-
efroys Dictionnaire de l ancienne langue franc 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
[de 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, mov-
ing 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 Watteaus f e^tes
 WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 331

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 spectators 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 wan-
der 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 encour-
aged 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, Watteaus for-
mal experiments granted viewers access to the pastoral dream-
scapes 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
Piless 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 de terminer].107 The f e^tes galantes produced
15 Jean-Antoine Watteau, Mezzetin, ca. 171820, oil on canvas,
the lack of focusand with it, the return to ones own thoughts 21 17 in. (55.2 43.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of
and emotionsthat feeds reverie. They forged an experience Art, New York (artwork in the public domain; photograph The
defined not by hallucinatory presence and the raptures of Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY)
enthousiasme but by the almost distracted engagement of a day-
dream, encouraging spectators to move continually between
the world of the painting and their imaginations in a way that one finds in solitude, for meditation, for dreaming [songer]
heightened both. Huyghes remark that Watteaus paintings about ones affairs, ones pleasures, or ones displeasures.111
were meant to be dreamed turns out to be more accurate than Scud erys praise for the isolated corners of the Ch^ateau de
even he would have realized. A new kind of encounter with Versailless gardens, pastoral landscapes not unlike
painting, and a new kind of spectator, had emerged. Watteaus, as fitting, to say the least, for a melancholy lovers
solitude and reverie exemplifies this new attitude.112 Reverie
The Painting of Modern Selfhood: Reverie and Interiority carved out, for the first time in a secular context, a desig-
The advent of this new encounter links Watteaus enterprise nated space for retreat into the self, where, alone in the seclu-
with the emergence, as historians have characterized it, of sion of a cabinet or in nature, one could be absorbed in ones
modern selfhood and interiority in the early modern period, thoughts and sentiments and fantasies. It defined a refuge
particularly in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- for self-discovery where dreamers could explore new modali-
turies.108 As we have seen, until the beginning of the seven- ties of feelingsubtle, ineffable, pleasurable. If the galant
teenth century, reverie was defined as a state of delirium, a ideals of civility defined a distinctly modern relationship
kind of madness. Specifically, it was understood as a pathol- between self and other, reverie helped define a distinctly
ogy brought about by an imbalance of the bodys four modern relationship of the self to its inner life.113
humors, or what was then called melancholy.109 In the Dic- The special mode of looking elicited by Watteaus f e^tes gal-
tionnaire de la langue franc aise du 16e sie cle, for instance, antes bound them, more than any other paintings of their
Edmond Huguet cites the following example by Jacques time, to this newly instituted form of interiority; designated
Amyot: The burning fevers that increase inflammation to them a site of a late, remarkable flowering of one of the great
the point of putting the man in a reverie and making him passions of the Grand Si ecle. In Watteau, the distance estab-
lose his understanding.110 Over the course of the seven- lished between spectator and painting by the artists degrada-
teenth century, however, new meanings arose. Reverie main- tion of enthousiasme and denial of erotic closure opened up a
tained its connection with melancholy, but both terms lost new sphere of subjective experience, a kind of interiorized
their medical baggage. They became instead sources of plea- mode of viewing. It freed spectators, in their ocular errancy,
sure, of self-understanding. As Antoine Fureti ere wrote in his to let their minds wander away from the picture, to allow the
Dictionnaire of 1690, melancholy, in addition to its older experience of looking to take them not back to the painting
meanings, signifies . . . an agreeable reverie, a pleasure that but inward, to the self.
332 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3
Watteaus La perspective (Fig. 16), painted about 1715, the
year of Louis XIVs death, throws the ideological consequen-
ces of this development into relief. With its amorous aristo-
crats 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 identifi-
able site: the Ch^ateau de Montmorency, country residence of
the artists 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^ateaus park.
The loggia, though, is no ordinary architectural folly; rather,
it is the former country house of Charles Le Brun, which Cro-
zat acquired in 1704 and soon after had gutted and reconfig-
ured as an open-air maison de plaisance.115 Despite its new
owner, the sites association with Le Brun endured. An etch-
ing by Caylus of Watteaus drawing of the loggia even identi-
fies the subject not as Crozats 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 individuals larger per-
sonal and social identity, the loggias metonymic relation to
Le Brun could not easily be effaced.
Could Watteaus 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. Typi-
cally, 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
Siecles most illustrious painter. It is tempting to think that
the sophisticated artists and amateurs who frequented
Crozats 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 Bruns
obsolescence has been exposed for all to see. We cannot
help but recall the entombment of Louis XIVs portrait in
16 Jean-Antoine Watteau, La perspective,
ca. 1715, oil on canvas, 18 21
(46.7 55.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston (artwork in the public domain;
photograph 2014 Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston)
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 Bruns 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,
Poussins Bergers d Arcadie (Fig. 18), for example, Death takes
center stage, and each figure freezes in contemplation of its
inescapable presencede Piles, despite his censure of
Poussins deficiencies in color, would have approved.117 In La
perspective, by contrast, Deaths monument is only dimly per-
ceptible in the background. Shielded by a curtain of trees,
the lovers and children disport themselves in the foreground,
blissfully unaware of the structures 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 galant-
erie, Death no longer casts its pall over the proceedings.
The stakes of Watteaus formal experiments are now com-
ing into focus. As the compositions structural heart, the hol-
lowed-out ch^ateau represents, in this new perspective, a
rejection of de Piless system and the model of authority it
embodied. Le Brun here is a figure not just of artistic or polit-
ical 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 experienceof
the authority of painting.118 It is no coincidence that de Piles
adopted political metaphors to explain his theory of compo-
sition, 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

17 Comte de Caylus, after a drawing by Jean-Antoine Watteau,
Maison de M. Le Brun, etching. Bibliotheque Nationale de
France, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph
provided by Bibliotheque Nationale de France)
the great.119 At its heart, his system aimed to establish
paintings absolute sovereignty over the looking subject.
Painting, he exclaimed, should permit no one to pass indif-
ferently . . . without being surprised, without stopping, and
without enjoying [jouir] for some time the pleasure of his sur-
prise.120 The experience of viewing was always dependent
on, and determined by, the overwhelming power of the exte-
rior 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 cap-
rices of ones feeling and judgment. Before examining any
detail, de Piles affirmed, [the spectator] finds himself trans-
ported all of a sudden and without his consent [malgre lui] to
the degree of enthousiasme to which the painter has brought
him.121
If enthousiasmes power depended on a fascinating and irre-
sistible center, in La perspective that center has been hollowed
outand 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 paintings compositional architecture, the gutted struc-
ture becomes a cipher for the collapse of reality into dream
WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 333
18 Nicolas Poussin, Les bergers d Arcadie, ca. 1650, oil on canvas,
33 47 in. (85 121 cm). Mus ee du Louvre, Paris (artwork
in the public domain; photograph by Erich Lessing, provided by
Art Resource, NY)
and the ascent of subjective experience. With his formal
innovations, the artist upended paintings sovereignty and
instituted a new, self-determining order of vision in which
eye and mind are encouraged to roamthe order of reverie.
Spectatorship emerged as an intimate, private encounter
with the canvas, grounded in the pleasures of instability,
indeterminacy, restlessness. Where de Piless model of picto-
rial effects obliterated the self in the stupefaction of enthou-
siasme, Watteaus pictorial effects allowed for the formation
of a new kind of viewing subject. By inviting his contemporar-
ies 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 auton-
omy of the self.
Aaron Wile, a specialist in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
French art, is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. His dis-
sertation, entitled Painting, Authority, and Experience at the Twi-
light of the Grand Sie cle, 16901721, 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
Bulletins 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 ownas 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: Phai-
don, 1964), 9.
3. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Watteau (1860), in French XVIII Cen-
tury 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. Screpel, 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 Paint-
ing of the Ancien Re gime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
6958.
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): 1731; and Jac-
queline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the
French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia 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 figural-
ity 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
Watteaus paintings.
8. The f e^te galante did not crystallize into a recognized genre until decades
after Watteaus 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
artists body of work, and so I use the term to designate paintings that
fall within this group. See Michel, Le ce le bre Watteau (Geneva: Droz,
2008), 16588; 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), 1727.
9. We should keep in mind, as Pierre Rosenberg reminds us, that
Watteaus art has profound roots in the culture of the Sun Kings
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), 14452.
10. On the principles of dessein, see Charles Le Brun, Sentiments sur le dis-
cours du m erite de la couleur par M. Blanchard, in Les confe rences de
l Acade mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture au XVIIe sie cle, ed. Alain M
erot
(Paris: ENSBA, 1996), 22833.
11. On the relation of Watteaus paintings to this model, see Bryson, Word
and Image, 2988.
12. Quoted in Andre Felibien, Memoires. . . ., in Nicolas Poussin, Lettres et
propos sur l art, ed. Anthony Blunt (Paris: Hermann, 1964), 19697. It
remains debatable whether Poussin actually said this, but it neatly sums
up the position of the partisans of dessein in the academy. The assign-
ment of the quotation to Poussin, Frances greatest painter, lends it the
weight almost of a fiat.
13. On the querelle, see Bernard Teyssedre, Roger de Piles et les de bats sur le col-
oris au sie cle de Louis XIV (Paris: La Bibliotheque des Arts, 1957).
14. See Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 11795; 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),
8384. My account of colorist theory here is particularly indebted to the
work of Puttfarken and Lichtenstein.
15. Roland Freart de Chambray, Ide e de la perfection de la peinture (1662;
reprint, Paris: ENSBA, 2005), 192.
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, 18295; and Sylvaine Guyot, Sur la toile comme en sc ene, peindre
lamour pour toucher, in Les discours de lamour, ed. Kristen A. as the trunk of a tree contains its branches, which it sends forth from dif-
Dickhaut and Alain Viala, Litte ratures Classiques 2, no. 69 (2009): 3944.
18. On illusionism in de Piles, see Puttfarken, Roger de Piles Theory of Art, 46
54; and Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 17885.
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), 1034.
21. On de Piless conception of disposition, which differs from Poussins and
Le Bruns 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 14001800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 26378.
22. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 7374.
23. Ibid., 100.
24. Ibid., 76.
25. De Piles, as Puttfarken has shown (The Discovery of Pictorial Composition,
27277), came to this position gradually. Whereas earlier de Piles main-
tained that the premier coup d oeil should convey the nature of the
paintings subject matter, what he emphasizes by 1677 is the importance
of paintings 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, representation, illusion, in La naissance de la theorie de
lart en France, 16401720, ed. Stefan Germer and Christian Michel,
special issue, Revue d Esthe tique 3132 (1997): 4750.
27. De Piles, Dialogue sur le coloris, 60. The status of truth in de Piles is com-
plex. De Piles, as Lichtenstein writes (The Eloquence of Color, 179),
separates the problem of pictorial truth from the metaphysical ques-
tion 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 real-
ity but the reality of a representationthat is, the effectiveness of an
illusion. For further discussion, see Lichtenstein, 16995; and Putt-
farken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 27273.
28. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 33. See Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color,
178; and Louis Marin, Representation and Simulacrum, in On Repre-
sentation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001), 316.
29. Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, 17879.
30. On enthousiasme in de Piles, see Puttfarken, Roger de Piles Theory of Art,
10624; and idem, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 27677.
31. Puttfarken, Roger de Piles Theory of Art, 120. Enthousiasme begins as the
artists state of mind in the midst of creation, his fureur pittoresque, or his
picturesque frenzy, which is then transferred to the spectator by
paintings 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.
34. Longinus, Traite 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. Lit-
man, Le sublime en France, 16601714 (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1971), is the
classic study but in some respects dated. More recent treatments, which
address the problematic approach of Litmans work and have greatly
enriched our understanding of the sublimes central place in seven-
teenth-century French literature, include Sophie Hache, La langue du
ciel: Le sublime en France au XVIIe sie 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 Liter-
ature (Charlottesville, Va.: Rockwood Press, 2003); and Emma Gilby, Sub-
lime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2006). De
Piles, it should be remarked, borrows much of Longinus-Boileaus lan-
guage in his definition of enthousiasme.
35. Longinus, Traite du Sublime, 74.
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), 1541.
37. On the relation of enthousiasme to Longinus-Boileaus sublime, see Putt-
farken, Roger de Piles Theory of Art, 10624; and Kerslake, Essays on the
Sublime, 13946. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 1078, describes
enthousiasmes 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
ferent 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 instanta-
neous, 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 paintings subject matter that
requires some reflection and subsumed the main qualities of Longinus-
Boileaus sublime into his enthousiasme.
38. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 3.
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

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 lHomme, 2011),
3136.
40. In fact, Watteaus name first appears in the Proce s-verbaux of the Royal
Academy on April 6, 1709, the day de Piless death was announced to the
body. Michel, Le ce le 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.
13637, 16869. 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 Francois Lemoyne rather than Watteau. Posner, Concerning the
Mechanical Parts of Painting and the Artistic Culture of Seventeenth-
Century France, Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (December 1993): 597. Unfortu-
nately, he does not elaborate.
42. Puttfarken makes a suggestive observation about Watteaus abandon-
ment of the strong sense of corporeality and life which de Piles
admired in Rubens, yet strangely claims the same for Francois Boucher,
whose treatment of the body continues in the Rubensian tradition in a
far more normative way than Watteaus. Puttfarken, Composition, Per-
spective 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 Watteaus practice as subversive of aca-
demic norms, but largely in the same terms as Brysons (Watteau and
Reverie)that is, as subversive of Le Bruns discursive model of paint-
ing. See Duro, The Academy and Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century
France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 23050.
Watteaus paintings have also been seen as politically subversive of the
absolutist claims of the state at the end of Louis XIVs reign. See Crow,
Painters and Public Life, 4578; 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), 6375; Georgia Cowart, Watteaus Pilgrimage
to Cythera and the Subversive Utopia of the Opera-Ballet, Art Bulletin 83,
no. 3 (September 2001): 46178; and idem, The Triumph of Pleasure:
Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008), 22252. My claims about Watteaus art theoretical subver-
sions 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 Watteaus borrowings from Rubens, see Valentine Miller, The Bor-
rowings of Watteau, Burlington Magazine 51, no. 292 (July 1927): 3744.
47. Comte de Caylus, La vie dAntoine Watteau, peintre de figures et de
paysage, lue a lAcademie le 3 fevrier 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 Watteaus Images of Conversation, in
Sheriff, Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist, 85.
51. De Piles, L ide e du peintre parfait (1699; reprint, Paris: Le Promeneur,
1993), 64.
52. Caylus, La vie dAntoine 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 Piless system, see ibid.,
16268, 22223.
56. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant l image: Questions pose es aux fins d une

histoire de l art (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1990), 280.
57. Le Brun, Sentiments sur le discours du merite de la couleur, 23031.
58. De Piles, L ide e du peintre parfait, 21. Jer^
ome Delaplanche has noted that
French theorists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
in contrast to some of their Italian counterparts, had little interest in fac-
ture or the materiality of paint. See Delaplanche, La touche et la
tache, in Rubens contre Poussin: La querelle du coloris dans la peinture
francaise a la fin du XVIIe sie cle, ed. Emmanuelle Delapierre, Matthieu
Gilles, and H elene Portiglia (Antwerp: Ludion, 2004), 6169.
59. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973). Michel, Le ce le bre Watteau, 118, argues
that Watteaus borrowings represent an attempt to carve out a place for
WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 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 Watteaus generations and, on the other,
how different Watteaus 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 latters influence in the artists
practice, Coypels 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 Watteaus continual recycling of
figures. Caylus, La vie dAntoine 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 bodys move to the margins of the com-
position helped set the eye in motion.
66. I am far from the first to note that Watteaus dynamic compositions
refuse a fixed point of view or that they suggest motion. Vidal, Watteau s
Painted Conversations, esp. 15, 136, has explained Watteaus composi-
tional 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, 4578, relating them to Watteaus early experience as a
painter of decorative grotesques. See Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in
French Culture of the Ancien Re gime (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 20941. My account, I want to emphasize, is not meant to
exclude or refute these interpretations; indeed, I think they can, to vary-
ing degrees, stand together. My purpose is to explain the artists compo-
sitional strategies in terms of contemporary theories of composition
and, from there, to draw conclusions about their significance in light of
those theoriesconclusions that lead in different directions from those
proposed by other scholars.
67. Michel, Le ce le 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 accord-
ing to the rules of perspective, which do not fit with the artists ambi-
tion 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 Michels 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 Watteaus
Embarkation for Cythera, Burlington Magazine 103, no. 698 (May 1961):
18085.
69. See, for example, G erard Le Coat, Le p elerinage a lile de Cyth
ere: Un
sujet aussi galant quallegorique, RACAR 2, no. 2 (1975): 923; Pierre
Rosenberg, Le p elerinage a lisle de Cith
ere, in Watteau, 16841721,

ed. M. Grasselli and Rosenberg (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des
Musees Nationaux, 1984), 399401; 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,
166270.
71. Alain Viala, La France galante: Essai historique sur une cate gorie culturelle, de
ses origines jusqu a la Re volution (Paris: PUF, 2008). Vialas book is pre-
ceded by a number of articles. See, for example, La litt erature galante,
histoire et probl ematique, in Il seicento francese oggi: Situazione e prospet-
tive della ricerca; Actes du colloque international, ed. Giovanni Dotoli (Bari:
Adriatica; Paris: Nizet, 1994), 100113; Dune politique des formes, la
galanterie, XVIIe Sie cle 46, no. 182 (1994): 14251; Lesprit galant, Bib-
lio 17 102 (1997): 99109; Qui ta fait minor? Galanterie et classicisme,
Litte ratures Classiques 31 (1997): 99109; and Les Signes Galants: A His-
torical Reevaluation of Galanterie, Yale French Studies, no. 92 (1997):
1129. See also Delphine Denis, Le Parnasse galant: Institution d une
cate gorie litte raire au XVIIe sie cle (Paris: Champion, 2001).
72. Viala, La France galante, 331.
73. See Crow, Painters and Public Life, 6674; Vidal, Watteau s Painted Conver-
sations; Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture, 20941; Plax,
336 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2014 VOLUME XCVI NUMBER 3
Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France, 10853; Cow-
art, Watteaus Pilgrimage to Cythera; and idem, The Triumph of Pleasure,
22252. For accounts that have attempted to link Watteau to galanterie in
light of Vialas work as well as other recent work on the subject, see Kris-
ten Dickhaut, Touche! La symphathie affectee par la galanterie chez
Watteau et Marivaux, in Dickhaut and Viala, Les discours de lamour,
10924; and Frauke Annegret Kurbacher-Sch onborn, Le reniement du
coeur: Quelques reflexions philosophiques sur la liaison dangereuse
entre lamour sensible et lindividualite (Watteau et Rousseau), in ibid.,
14159; as well as Vialas own extended reflections on the artist in La
France galante, 32355. Vialas discussion of Watteau as a quintessentially
galant artist is the starting point of my own, but he characterizes the
artists work in more general terms than I do. He defines Watteaus work
as peinture dambience, or painter of atmosphere; in their lack of
defined subject and formal ambiguity, Viala claims, his paintings mani-
fest 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 beaute et la gr^ace: Lesthetique platonicienne des
Amours de Psyche, Revue d Histoire Litte 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 Mere, Des agremens (1677), in Oeuvres comple tes, ed.
Charles-Henri Boudhors (Paris: Klincksieck, 2008), 38. Lichtenstein, The
Eloquence of Color, 19195, discusses the Chevalier de M
er
es rejection of
the de Pilean aesthetic.
77. Dominic Bouhours, La manie re de bien penser dans les ouvrages d esprit
(1687; new ed., Paris, 1715), 385.
78. Lafond, La beaute et la gr^ace, 477.
79. On the relation of these terms to enthousiasme, see Puttfarken, Roger de
Piles Theory of Art, 10624.
80. Viala, La France galante, 378.
81. Published versions of Longinuss 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 Boileaus version, the first published French edi-
tion, that it achieved a position of such centrality in literary and artistic
theory. For an overview of the sublime in France before Boileaus 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),
77101.
82. James Elkins draws on the je ne sais quoi to understand what he calls
Watteaus anti-subject in Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1999), 15973; as does Viala, La France galante, 32355. Elkins also
draws on Bouhourss de licatesse but does not adequately distinguish it
from the je ne sais quoi, introduced in the authors earlier work, Entretiens
d Ariste et d Euge ne of 1671. De licatesse represents a refinement of
Bouhourss thinking on the je ne sais quoi (in which surprise and dazzle-
ment are key elements), prompted in part by the publication of Longi-
nus-Boileaus Traite du sublime in 1674. On the relation of the je ne sais
quoi and de licatesse to the sublime, see Litman, Le sublime en France, 105
20; Kerslake, Essays on the sublime, 95110; Cronk, The Classical Sublime,
13236; and Hache, La langue du ciel, 8699. Cronk and Hache write
most explicitly of de licatesse as a critique of the sublime. On gr^ a ce, see
Lafond, La beaute et la gr^ace.
83. Bouhours, La manie re de bien penser, 107.
84. Ibid., 214.
85. Ibid., 213.
86. Dictionnaire de l Acade mie (Paris, 1694), at Classiques Garnier
Num erique: Dictionnaires des 16e et 17e s., http://www.classiques-
garnier.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
Sie cle (Paris: Honore Champion, 2006). See also Bernard Beugnot,
Po etique de la r^everie, in La me moire du texte: Essais de poe 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, 323400.
89. Madeleine de Scudery, Cle lie, histoire romaine, pt. 2 (1655; new ed., Paris:
Honor e Champion, 2002), 31314. On Scudery and reverie, see Orwat,
e verie, 33751.
L invention de la r^
90. Chevalier de Mere, Maximes, sentences et re flexions morales et politiques
(Paris, 1687), 38.
91. On the diffusion of galanterie, see Viala, La France galante, 25897.
92. Antoine Coypel, Sur lexcellence de la peinture, in M
erot, Les con-
fe rences de l Acade mie Royale, 52526.
93. Ibid., 526.
94. Michel, Le ce le bre Watteau, discusses the relationship between Coypels
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), 20764.
96. On the appeal of Watteaus technique to the amateur, see Posner,
Concerning the Mechanical Parts of Painting, 59798.
97. Antoine Coypel, Sur lesth etique du peintre, in M
erot, Les confe rences
de l Acade mie Royale, 419.
98. On the emergence of the amateur, as a category distinct from the connois-
seur and the curieux, see Ziskin, Sheltering Art, 2057. Coypel, Sur
lesthetique du peintre, it should be noted, does not use the term ama-
teur here-he uses the term gens du mondewhich 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 eres 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 ama-
teur in the eighteenth century, see Charlotte Guichard, Les amateurs d art
a Paris au XVIIIe sie cle (Seyssel: Champ Valon, 2008).
99. Coypel, Sur lexcellence de la peinture, 526.
100. Orwat, L invention de la r^e verie, 181385; and Bernard Beugnot, Le dis-
cours de la retraite au XVIIe sie cle (Paris: PUF, 1996), 87109.
101. Fr
ederic Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l ancienne langue franc aise et de tous des
dialectes du 9e au 15e sie cles (Paris, 18811902), 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, 1942.
103. Vidal, Style as Subject in Watteaus Images of Conversation, 83, makes
a similar point about how the non-fini of Watteaus brushwork activates
the spectators imagination. See also idem, Watteau s Painted Conversa-
tions, 130.
104. De Piles, commentary on L art de peinture, 155.
105. Though it would be unwise to presume to know the state of Watteaus
mind as he created his art, we should remember that de Piles believed
enthousiasme affected the artist as well. It is tempting, therefore, to specu-
late that Watteau, too, was understood to have been in a state of reverie
when he drew and painted. Cayluss remark that Watteau drew sans
objet (La vie dAntoine 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 Watteaus 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, Cle lie, pt. 2, 314.
107. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 297.
108. On selfhood in early modern Europe, see, for various perspectives, Ber-
nard Tocanne, L ide e de la nature en France dans la seconde moitie du XVIIe
sie cle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978), 14165; Robert Muchembled,
L invention de l homme moderne: Sensibilite s, moeurs et comportements collectifs
sous l Ancien Re 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 Renais-
sance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1996); Jean Rohou, Le XVIIe

sie cle, une re volution de la conscience humaine (Paris: Editions du Seuil,
2002); and Dror Wharman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Cul-
ture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2004). On the rise of interiority in seventeenth-century France, see Ber-
nard Beugnot, Loisir, retraite, solitude: De lespace priv e a la
litterature, in Le loisir lettre a l a^ge classique, ed. Marc Fumaroli, Philippe-
Joseph Salazar, and Emmanuel Bury (Geneva: Droz, 1996), 17396; Joan
DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de
Sie cle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 78123; and Bene-
detta Papasogli, Le fond du coeur : Figures de l espace inte rieur au XVIIe
sie cle (Paris: Honor e Champion, 2000).
109. Robert Morrissey, Vers un topos litt
eraire: La prehistoire de la r^
everie,
Modern Philology 77, no. 3 (February 1980): 27080; and Orwat,
e verie, 4364.
L invention de la r^
110. Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue franc aise du 16e sie cle (Paris,
192573), at Classiques Garnier Num erique, http://www.classiques-

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 Posners 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 mel-
ancholy. See Posner, Watteau melancolique: La formation dun
mythe, Bulletin de la Socie te de l Histoire de l Art Franc ais (1973): 34561.
112. Madeleine de Scudery, 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, 35185, 42975; Morrissey, La r^
e verie
jusqu a Rousseau, 5576; and Beugnot, Le discours de la retraite au XVIIe
sie cle, 19297. 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, 167206. Of course, rev-
erie is itself inextricable from the emergence of civility; on reveries rela-
tion to civility, see Orwat, 450-69.
114. It is a striking and irresistible historical coincidence that Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, the eighteenth centurys 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), 13137; and Hans
Junecke, Montmorency: Der Landsitz Charles Le Brun s; Geschichte, Gestalt und
die Ile Enchante e (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling, 1960), 2021.
116. Robert Neuman, Watteaus L Enseigne de Gersaint and the Baroque
Emblematic Tradition, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 104 (November 1984): 15457.
117. On the theme of death in Poussin and Watteau, see Erwin Panofsky,
On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau, in Philoso-
phy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky
and H. J. Paton (1936; New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 22354.
118. In her reading, Katie Scott makes a connection between the Ch^ateau de
Montmorency and Versailles and between Le Brun and Louis XIV,
WATTEAU, REVERIE, AND SELFHOOD 337
suggesting that the carcass (as she evocatively puts it) of Le Bruns
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 Eigh-
teenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 15759. It
is a compelling claim, but Scotts comparison between Montmorency
and Versailles, based on what she assumes are formal similarities
between Le Bruns garden and Louis XIVs garden, is questionable.
Scott writes, [I]n Watteaus picture the exaggeration of the perspectival
strength once used by a giants 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 facade (157). The problematic assumption
of a monolithic classicism at Versailles that overshadows such an analysis
aside, Le Bruns ch^ateau and gardens in fact represented a prototypi-
cally galant escape. Junecke, Montmorency, 1165, has shown that Mont-
morency, unlike Versailles, was conceived with an obstructed view and
that Watteaus 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 Com-
position, 24578, has demonstrated, perspective occupied a place of
far less importance than internal compositional harmony (that is,
the tout ensemble) in de Piless system, and, indeed, in French art
theory more generally. Perspective is thus less significant an issue in
Watteaus painting than Scott seems to assumeits title, added after
the artists death, notwithstanding. In more general terms, I am hes-
itant to ascribe straightforward political meaning to Watteaus com-
positional strategies. The history of the complex relation of the
emergence of interiority to absolutism remains to be written, and
while Watteaus invitation to reverie is indisputably politically
fraught, I do not believe it can be reduced to subversion, or sup-
port, of absolutism.
119. De Piles, commentary on L art de peinture, 15455; and idem, Cours de
peinture, 99.
120. De Piles, Cours de peinture, 3.
121. Ibid., 107.
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