"Watteau" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the dining-room, others elegant knick-knacks for the boudoir; many are kept constantly busy delineating for the respect of future generations his lordship, or her ladyship's family. The painting of the eighteenth century is brilliant illustration still touched with art. For instance, in Watteau, Canaletto, Crome, Cotman, and Guardi there is some art, some brilliance, and a great deal of charming illustration. In Tiepolo there is hardly anything but brilliance; only when one sees his work beside that of Mr. Sargent does one realise the presence of other qualities. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the dealers in old books, engravings, and antiquated furniture drew my eyes and appealed to my fancy. Rummaging and idling among these, I hastily enjoyed some verses spiritedly thrown off by a poet of the Pleiad. I examined an elegant Masquerade by Watteau. I felt, with my eye, the weight of a two-handed sword, a steel gorgerin, a morion. What a thick helmet! What a ponderous breastplate— Seigneur! A giant's garb? No—the carapace of an insect. The men ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... painters of the regular second-empire type. Theobald, we know from Mr. Henry James, was a man of ideas who could not carry out his intentions. It must have been an exquisite memory of Theobald's failures which made Pater, when he wished to contrive an imaginary artistic personality, take Watteau as being some one in whose achievements you can believe. No literary artist can persuade us into admiring pictures which never existed; though an artist can reconstruct from literature a picture which has perished we know, from ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... looking little girls stood before me, holding up their frocks, and showing me their rosebuds of hairless slits, as they also rubbed and frigged their little cunts, smiling and telling me they could. They were exquisitely dressed in the Watteau style, looking almost like Dresden figures, being so chic and delicate; then, seating themselves one on each side me on the grass, they proceeded to handle and play with my great big prick, allowing me at the same time to frig their two little ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... WATTEAU, ANTOINE, celebrated French painter and engraver, born at Valenciennes; his pictures were numerous and the subjects almost limited to pseudo-pastoral rural groups; the tone of the colouring is pleasing, and the design ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... (1368-1644) Asiatic art had reached much the same stage. The Ming picture in the British Museum known as The Earthly Paradise is inferior to the best work of Botticelli, with which it is commonly compared, but reminds us, in its finished grace and gaiety, of a painting by Watteau. Korin, towards the end of the Ming period, is about as empty as Velasquez and more brilliant than Frans Hals. The eighteenth century, one inclines to believe, was the same everywhere. Stylistic obsession ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... palatial apartment furnished in white and gold—Louis Quinze, or something of the sort—with very new decorations after Watteau covering the walls. The process of disfiguration, however, had already begun. A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a matchboard screen had ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... ungallant liberties of Time, and to Death, the rude destroyer, it is a delight to us to know that their charms are destined to bloom for ever in the sparkling graces of the patrician letter-writer. In his epistles are to be seen, even in more vivid tints than those of Watteau, these splendid creatures in all the pride of their beauty and of their wardrobe, pluming themselves as if they never could grow old, and casting around them their piercing glances and no less poignant raillery. But Horace Walpole is not content with thus ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... recovers from his alarm] I understand. She has taken the costumes into her own hands. She is an expert in beautiful costumes. I venture to promise you, Mr Savoyard, that what you are about to see will be like a Louis Quatorze ballet painted by Watteau. The heroine will be an exquisite Columbine, her lover a dainty Harlequin, her father a picturesque Pantaloon, and the valet who hoodwinks the father and brings about the happiness of the lovers a grotesque but perfectly tasteful Punchinello ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... half hidden from the precincts of the chateau, are the Chaumiere and the Ermitage and they recall the background of a Fragonard or a Watteau. It is all very "stagy"—but, since it exists, can ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... and science of their time, than to bid for a cane-bottomed chair that either of these two ladies had adorned. The same thing might be said, in a different sense, of Voltaire; while, as every one knows, the money-value of any hand-stroke of Watteau or Hogarth, Nattier or Sir Joshua, is out of all proportion to the importance of the men. Society seemed to delight in talking with solemn conviction about serious values, and in paying fantastic prices for nothing but the most futile. The drama acted at Peking, in the summer of 1900, was, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Murillo in the first class of painters, founding his claim upon these Virgin altar-pieces, I am your humble servant. Tom Moore painted altar-pieces as well as Milton, and warbled Sacred Songs and Loves of the Angels after his fashion. I wonder did Watteau ever try historical subjects? And as for Greuze, you know that his heads will fetch 1,000L., 1,500L., 2,000L.—as much as a Sevres "cabaret" of Rose du Barri. If cost price is to be your criterion of worth, what shall we ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have been seen by many readers in the famous old Philipse house,—Washington's headquarters,—in the town of Yonkers. The fireplaces, worthy of the wide-throated central chimney, were bordered by pictured tiles, some of them with Scripture stories, some with Watteau-like figures,—tall damsels in slim waists and with spread enough of skirt for a modern ballroom, with bowing, reclining, or musical swains of what everybody calls the "conventional" sort,—that is, the swain adapted to genteel ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... marble, and throws its joyous light on the carefully polished floor; nothing can be more cheerful than the old fashioned chintz hangings and curtains with red Chinese figures upon a white ground, and the panels over the door painted with pastoral scenes in the style of Watteau. A clock of Sevres china, and rosewood furniture inlaid with green—quaint and portly furniture, twisted into all sorts of grotesque shapes—complete the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the pages of the best comedies, we are almost transported to another world, and escape from this dull age to one that was all life, and whim, and mirth, and humour. The curtain rises, and a gayer scene presents itself, as on the canvas of Watteau. We are admitted behind the scenes like spectators at court, on a levee or birthday; but it is the court, the gala-day of wit and pleasure, of gallantry and Charles II.! What an air breathes from the name! ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the Emperor's father, Frederick III, was born, lived as Crown Prince, reigned for ninety-nine days, and died. Here, too, are more "apartments of Frederick the Great," with pictures by Rubens, including an "Adoration of the Magi," a good example of Watteau and a portrait of Voltaire drawn by Frederick's own hand. In the north wing are situated the present Emperor's suite of chambers, where distinguished men of all countries have discussed almost every conceivable topic, political, social, religious, martial, ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... the staircase met Mrs. Hazeldean. He gave her back the book; and as he was about to speak, she beckoned to him to follow her into a little morning-room appropriated to herself. No boudoir of white and gold, with pictures by Watteau, but lined with walnut-tree presses, that held the old heir-loom linen strewed with lavender—stores for the housekeeper, and medicines for ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Parisian frivolity thought it good taste to admire the rustic and naive. The idyls of Gessner and the pastorals of Florian were the favorite reading, and Watteau the popular painter. Gentlefolks, steeped in artifice, vice, and intrigue, masked their empty lives under the as sumption of Arcadian simplicity, and minced and ambled in the costumes of shepherds and shepherdesses. Marie Antoinette transformed her chalet of Petit Trianon ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... underfoot the carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the flowers—Jacqueline wanted to pluck them all, to wreathe the wondering fawns, as ladies with picture hats do in the old frivolous rococo fantasies. And as to that, she might have been one of those Watteau ladies herself, so rich was the coloring there, and she in the foreground so white, so soft of skin, so sylvan and ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... given to Louis XVI. by the States of Burgundy, and portraits of the King and Marie Antoinette. The Cabinet de Travail of the queen was a cabinet given to her on her marriage by the town of Paris; in the Salle de Reception are four pictures by Watteau; the Boudoir has a Sevres bust of the queen; in the Chambre-a-coucher is the queen's bed, and a portrait of the Dauphin by Lebrun. These simple rooms are a standing defense of the queen from the false accusations ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... you—at first?" she retorted laughingly. "After all that has taken place? Mon Dieu! You remember I advised you against this madness—I told you in the beginning it might not all be like Watteau's masterpiece—the divine embarkation!" ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... from the internal evidence supplied by the Baptism of Christ of Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci; but a stronger substructure of fact supports the unpleasing anecdotes as to Titian and Tintoretto, as to Watteau and Pater, as to our own Hudson and Reynolds, and, alas! as to very many others. How touching, on the other hand, is that simple entry in Francesco Francia's day-book, made when his chief journeyman, ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... collection of furniture, pictures, wood carvings, and faience. The Baron lived there alone, attended by three old servants. No one ever enters the place. No one had ever beheld the three Rubens that he possessed, his two Watteau, his Jean Goujon pulpit, and the many other treasures that he had acquired by a vast expenditure ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... sunshine as it falls; the purple heath, the luxuriant ferns. There is 'une recolte magnifique' this year, and the people have but one thought—'the gathering in;' the country presents to us a picture—not like Watteau's 'fetes galantes,' but rather ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... my dear Greatson," he said abstractedly, "do not want the real thing—from you. Every man to his metier. Yours is to sing of blue skies and west winds, of hay-scented meadows and Watteau-like revellers in a paradise as artificial as a Dutch garden. Take my advice, and keep your muse chained. The other worlds are ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and M. de Malesherbes had not yet laid their enterprising hands upon the old fabric of French administration, and already painting, sculpture, architecture, and music had shaken off the shackles of the past. The conventional graces of Vanloo, of Watteau, of Boucher, of Fragonard, had given place to a severer school. Greuze was putting upon canvas the characters and ideas of Diderot's Drame naturel; but Vien, in France, was seconding the efforts of Winkelman ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... tired of those Watteau things!" began Miss Lawrence disdainfully. "They all savor of bread-and-butter girls,—a shepherdess with her crook,—bah! And I've been Marie Stuart so many times. If it were a masquerade; but garden-parties are beginning to prove bores, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... I cried, "this masquerade? Some figure for to-night's charade, A Watteau shepherdess or maid?" She smiled and begged my pardon: "Why, surely you must know the name,— That woman who was Shakespeare's flame Or Byron's,—well, it's all the same: ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... picturesque!" "You could not sell them," replied his friend. "Well, then, what do you say to fauns and dryads?" "Who in Paris cares for fauns and dryads?" "What shall I do, then?" said Millet in despair. "What does the public like?" "It likes Boucher's Cupids, Watteau's Pastorals, nudities, anecdotes, and copies of the past." It was hard for Millet, but hunger drove him. He would not appeal to his family, life was as difficult for them as for him. But before yielding he would make one more trial, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... one on Denys L'Auxerrois, where the sweet, perilous legend of the exiled god—has he really been ever far from us, that treacherous Son of scorched white Flesh?—leads us so far, so strangely far. That one on Watteau, the Prince of Court Painters, where his passion for things faded and withdrawn reaches its climax. For Pater, like Antoine, is one of those always ready to turn a little wearily from the pressure of their own too vivid days, and seek a wistful ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... credulity prevail, Where Glums and Gawries wear mysterious things, That serve at once for jackets and for wings. Age, that enfeebles other men's designs, But heightens thine, and thy free draught refines. In several ways distinct you make us feel— Graceful as Raphael, as Watteau genteel. Your lights and shades, as Titianesque, we praise; And warmly wish you ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... original and admirable thing: he managed the real details of modern love affairs in verse, and love is the most realistic thing in the world. He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the "blue spirt of a lighted match" for the monotony ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the half-light (abat-jour); this is used principally for a ground, covering the whole surface of the glass, within which (the necessary spaces having been previously cut out before it is stuck on the glass) are placed medallion centres of Watteau figures, perfectly transparent, which derive increased brilliancy from the semi-transparency of the surrounding ground. This is by far the cheapest method, though involving extra trouble, as the plain grounds printed in ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... perusal. . . . Modern things dazzle me. I must look at them through Time's telescope. Elia complains that to him the merit of a MS. poem is uncertain; "print," as he excellently says, "settles it." Fifty years' toning does the same thing to a picture.' He is happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and Michael Angelo; happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things. What is Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of the Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our English school ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... brocades from a chest in the garret, the dowager Marquise of the proverb just played. And a little further, in the shadow of the doorway, stood Angelot in powdered wig, silk coat, and sword, looking like a handsome courtier from a group by Watteau, and his eyes showed plainly enough what woman, if not what cause, attracted him at the moment. As to causes, Monsieur Joseph and the Vicomte des Barres were deep in talk close by; two Chouans consulting in the very presence of ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... past that?" scoffed Harold, sitting astride a chair and looking at her quizzically. "Nobody pays any attention to Estelle's numerous little affairs. I'd as soon think of criticizing a Watteau ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... she replied. "Nothing requires a little artificial aid so much as nature. It is the piquancy of the contrast, you see. That is why the decorations of Watteau are the most wonderful in the world. He knew how to combine the purely, exquisitely artificial with the entirely simple. Now to break the news ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... very real poetical genius. It was the method of the old pastoral poets like Theocritus. It was in another way that adopted by the elegance and piety of Spenser. It was certainly expressed in the pictures of Watteau; and it had a very sympathetic and even manly expression in modern England in the decorative poetry of William Morris. These men of genius, from Theocritus to Morris, occupied themselves in endeavouring to describe happiness as a state of certain human beings, the atmosphere ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... sprung up at the Park gates, in which each cottage is a gem, and seems transplanted from the last book on rural ornamentation. But the sight of the village oppresses one with a strange incongruity; the charm of realism is wanting; it needs a population out of one of Watteau's pictures,—clean and deft as the painted figures; flesh and blood are too gross, too prone to muddy shoes, and to—sneeze. The rock-work, also, is incongruous; it belongs on no such wavy roll of park-land; you see it a thousand times grander, a half-hour's drive away, toward Matlock. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... one agreed that the woman was a fool to give up wealth for a dull existence in the woods. "All the same it's very sweet," sighed Mrs. Belgrove, having made as much mischief as she possibly could. "I should like it myself if I could only dress as a Watteau shepherdess, you know, and carry a lamb with a blue ribbon round its ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... lips, the rose-leaf delicacy of her colour, seemed to hold him. Among the pretty things with which the room was crowded she was the prettiest; and he probably was conscious of it. Propped up against the French bureau stood a Watteau drawing in red chalk—a sanguine—he had bought in Paris on a recent visit. The eyes of the old connoisseur went from the living face to ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mother and sister. That fellow, who is now as arrogant a stickler for the dignity of art as you or my Lord Chancellor may be for that of the bar, stooped then to deal clandestinely with fancy shops, and imitate Watteau on fans. I have two hand-screens that he painted for a shop in Rathbone Place. I suppose he may have got ten shillings for them, and now any admirer of Frank's would give L100 apiece ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in 1721, not in 1722," she replied. "The only date I can never remember is William the Conqueror. But of course you couldn't remember about Watteau. It's distance makes ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... lenient a view of the case ... otherwise ...! They were quite certain in their own minds that poor Owen had been culpable, if not guilty. They were married six months later. The Directoire hats were out of date, of course, but Louis Quinze, with Watteau trimmings suited the six bridesmaids marvellously, and the "Non Angli sed Angeli" choir rendered the Anthem and the "Voice ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating a school that produced many imitators and established a place apart for itself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the United States what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemish school in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster found the United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German and Italian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain forever impressed ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... direction of the whole was given to the celebrated artist Philibert Delorme. In 1630 the Gobelins was fully established as a larger plant, and has never made another move. The work has increased ever since those days, on much the same general lines. Celebrated French artists have designed tapestries: Watteau, Boucher, and others were interpreted by the brilliant manager whose signature appears on the works, Cozette, who was manager from 1736 until 1792. With this technical perfection came the death of the art ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... is the—Loomis calls it "Musical Symbolism," for Adelaide Ann Proctor's "The Story of the Faithful Soul." Of the greatest delicacy imaginable is the music (for piano, violin, and voice) to William Sharp's "Coming of the Prince." The "Watteau Pictures" are poems of Verlaine's variously treated: one as a head-piece to a wayward piano caprice, one to be recited during a picturesque waltz, the last a song with mandolin effects ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... green grass formed a background against which the women, in their new Parisian toilets, under their bright parasols, stood out like wondrous bouquets of moving flowers. The whole atmosphere was a delightful mingling of idle gaiety, flirtation, and graceful sensuousness. A modern Watteau would have seized upon the ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... her complexion; one would say that she made up every morning with Watteau's palate, 'She is fair, and her conquering glances kindle love in every heart.' ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... was she who had pleaded most for the preservation of the empire grand piano. The one in the gold case with all the Watteau figures and garlands painted on it, that had been saved as one of the "white hyacinths" from the old home. After the day's work was over, it was always Helen who stole into the dim front room to listen while her mother played over favorite airs from the old grand-operas. ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... boots; she shows a leg, she has a short skirt with a peculiar hang, due no doubt to mysteries about the waist; she wears a comic little hat over one brow; there is something of Columbine about her, something of the Watteau shepherdess, something of a vivandiere, something of every age but the present age. Her face, subject to the strange dictates of the mode, is smooth like the back of a spoon, with small features and little whisker-like curls before the ears such ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... carrying the elegance of the 18th century through the storm into the period beyond, notably Prud'hon, who has been called the Watteau of the Revolution. His portraits of the women of the Bonaparte family, Josephine, Hortense, Pauline, have all the grace and fascination of the earlier age, merge with it the abandon of the Directoire period, and touch the whole with ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston |
