Jean Antoine Watteau was born in 1684 in Valenciennes, a small town that passed from Flemish to French rule in the 1670s. During the War of Spanish Succession—started by Louis XIV of France to establish his grandson on the Spanish throne after the death of King Charles II of Spain—a number of important battles were fought near Valenciennes. About 1710, as the war was raging, Watteau visited his birthplace and around this time painted a number of military scenes.
The French army was notorious for its handsome soldiers, who were often selected according to their looks. One officer is known to have exclaimed: “is it really necessary that the most beautiful men be destined to death?” France eventually won the war, notwithstanding a very high death toll. At one battle alone—at Malplaquet on September 11, 1709, where many of Watteau’s friends fought—more than 30,000 lives were lost: among them, soldiers with war nicknames such as “blondie,” “the beautiful,” “big Cupid,” and “the tulip.” Horace Walpole noted this paradox as depicted in Watteau’s military subjects, when he wrote: “In his halts and marches of armies, the careless slouch of his soldiers still retains the air of a nation that aspires to be agreeable as well as victorious.”
In this small, jewel-like painting, Watteau subtly evokes, in an elegiac mode, the grimly uncertain future of these young men. Rather than glorifying war, as many history painters did, Watteau focuses on life at the margins of war. Lolling about, sleeping, smoking, with their muskets and drum at rest, their dog asleep, they seem oblivious of the war waged all along the northern borders of France. This is an unusual scene for a painter best known for his fêtes galantes—variations on the theme of figures in ball dress or masquerade costumes disporting themselves in parkland settings.
The scene was traditionally believed to be set outside the walls of Valenciennes, but the portal shown did not exist, and the background is instead one that Watteau based on a print. The rare military scenes Watteau painted during the War of Spanish Succession are an important, though less known, aspect of the artist’s work.
The Portal of Valenciennes
Watteau’s only known guard scene (as opposed to a march or camp scene), this is one of his best preserved paintings of military life. Suffused with golden light, two pairs of soldiers converse across the space of the picture, while the three other figures in the foreground have withdrawn into sleep or reverie. The enigmatic exchanges among these men transform an otherwise prosaic moment into a moving image of the social conditions of military life and the fragility of human connection. Despite its title, added in 1912, there is little evidence that the painting depicts the artist’s hometown of Valenciennes, where he returned for a brief visit in 1710.
This work was included in the exhibition Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France.
Théophile-Étienne-Joseph Thoré, Paris, probably after 1859. His sale (posthumous), Hôtel Drouot, Paris, December 5, 1892, Lot 39, sold for 2,250 francs. Jacques Doucet, Paris. His sale, Paris, June 6, 1912, Lot 192, repr., sold for 56,000 francs. Albert Lehmann, Paris. His sale, Paris, June 8, 1925, Lot 222, repr., sold for 96,000 francs. [By 1928] Otto Bemberg, Paris, 1961. Luis Bemberg and by descent. Sotheby’s, London, December 12, 1990, Lot 7, repr., sold for £530,000. Colnaghi, New York. Sold to the Frick Collection, February 15, 1991, purchased with funds from the bequest of Arthemise Redpath.
Source: The Frick Collection: Drawings, Prints & Later Acquisitions. Volume IX. New York: The Frick Collection, 2003.
