Jean Antoine Watteau

Mailand Collection, sale, Paris, Drouot, 4-19 April 1881, lot 148;
Henri Michel-Lévy,
his sale, Paris, Georges Petit, 12-13 May 1919, lot 122;
purchased at the sale by Marius Paulme, for Georges Dormeuil (L.1146),
thence by descent to the present owners

K.T. Parker, The Drawings of Antoine Watteau, London 1931, p. 43, no. 22, pl. 22;
K.T. Parker and J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau, Catalogue complet de son oeuvre dessiné, Paris 1957, vol. I, no. 510, repr.;
J. Mathey, Antoine Watteau. Peintures réapparues, inconnues ou négligées par les historiens; identifications par les dessins; chronologie, Paris 1959, pp. 36, 76, no. 76, repr.;
R. Huyghe, L'univers de Watteau, Paris 1968, repr. p. 106;
D. Posner, Antoine Watteau, London 1984, p. 288, note 16; 
M.M. Grasselli, in Watteau, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, Paris, Grand Palais, and Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg, 1984-85, p. 189;
idem., The Drawings of Antoine Watteau, unpub. PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1987, p. 261;
P. Rosenberg and L.-A. Prat, Antoine Watteau, Catalogue raisonné des Dessins, Milan 1996, vol. II, no. 412, and p. 1048 under no. 615

Hinged down right side to backing card. Paper somewhat discoloured, except in very narrow band around edges of the sheet. Lightly foxed throughout, and particularly at extreme edges of the sheet. Chalk still very good and fresh. Sold in a carved and gilded frame.
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Drawn with all Watteau's characteristic brilliant energy and wit, this relatively large scale study of the head and shoulders of a man looking off to the left has not been seen in public since it was acquired nearly a century ago by Georges Dormeuil.  The scale of the figure allows Watteau an exceptional degree of freedom, and particularly in details such as the figure's hair with the faun's horns poking through, the black chalk lines seem almost to challenge the artist to contain them. 

Whether on this large scale or in his more usual, slightly more precisely worked drawings, such as lot 72, Watteau is always the absolute master of flickering light, which not only pleases the eye but animates his figures of every type.  Here, this lively sense is reinforced by the man's keenly focussed gaze, and humourous turn of the lip.  Also significant is the way in which the artist has employed sparing touches of graphite, in conjunction with the red and black chalks in which this study is primarily executed.  The very different surface effect of graphite was something that Watteau explored and exploited with great effect in many of his drawings, and the Study of a Seated Woman, lot 72, is a superb example of this.  In the present drawing, although there are only a very few touches of graphite, they are characteristically telling:  perhaps the most obvious of these touches are to be found, underneath the black chalk, in the figure's eyebrow, giving extra depth and sense of movement - and movement in an eyebrow brings with it animation and humour.

Rosenberg and Prat propose a dating around 1715-1716.  During this period, Watteau made some of his most extraordinarily dynamic, expressive drawings, several of which are very comparable to the present work in terms of handling.  Though a very different drawing in terms of subject, in its technique the magnificent Three Studies of a Young Girl Wearing a Hat, executed in December 1716 and now in the collection of Ann and Gordon Getty, shares many qualities with the present drawing, as do two vibrant figure studies of a Satyr and a Nude Man (Jupiter), in the Courtauld Institute and the Louvre, respectively, both of which are dated by Rosenberg and Prat to very slightly later, circa 1717.¹

Various authors have suggested that this drawing shows the same man as another in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,² a study for the painting of Mezzetin in the same museum, and that the man in question may have been the comédien Roccoboni, but Rosenberg and Prat do not accept this theory.  Indeed, although the form of the mouth in both drawings is fairly similar, the link does seem tenuous.  Rosenberg and Prat also reject the suggested connection between this head study and the figure of a standing faun in the background of the Portrait of Antoine de La Roque (fig. 1).³ 

1.  Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., nos. 438, 374 and 375 respectively
2.  Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., no, 615
3.  Tokyo, Fuji Art Museum.