Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France

This study fully investigates, for the first time, the art of conversation as the privileged occupation of the society Watteau depicted. Recognizing the self-reflexive nature of social discourse, Watteau represented conversation in a way that defined and called attention to his new manner of painting. This representation of the functioning and forms of his own art is confirmed by Michel Foucault's analysis of the transformation of language beginning in the classical age. The new primacy of the spoken word in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France, became linked to and reinforced: (1) the discreet, civilizing rhetoric of Watteau's subjects, (2) his insistent representation of artistic behavior and artistic process, (3) the open-ended character of his images that call for the beholder's visual and verbal participation, and (4) his liberation of high art from its traditional dependency on the written word. Conversation became a central theme for Watteau. Polite talk is represented or assumed in all of Watteau's images of society and unexpectedly serves as the basic framework for figural relationships even in his military, mythological, and religious painting. Watteau's society was also preoccupied with the spoken word. Polite discourse was elaborated as a form of aristocratic self-definition and self-display in women's salons and in numerous literary works devoted to the representation and analysis of conversation. Four important aspects of conversation as a social practice find expression both in this literary genre and in Watteau's oeuvre: the paradoxical significance and insignificance of subject matter, the primacy of manner or process; a dialogic pattern of social and formal relationships; and the assumed superiority of speech over writing. Nevertheless, conversational writings must not be understood as having influenced Watteau. Rather this literary genre helps us to understand how Watteau used conversation to declare the independence of painting from the written word and to celebrate the power of images to "converse" directly with the viewer. Concluding this study is a new analysis of Watteau's L'Enseigne de Gersaint as the quintessential image of conversation in its merging of aesthetic and social codes.