Actors of the Comédie-Française, also traditionally known as The Coquettes (; from ), is an oil on panel painting in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, by the French Rococo artist Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). Variously dated within the 1710s by scholars, the painting forms a compact half-length composition that combines portraiture and genre painting, notably influenced by Venetian school, the Le Nain brothers, and Watteau's master Claude Gillot; one of the rarest cases in Watteau's body of work, it shows five figures — two women, two men, and a black boy — amid a darkened background, in contrary to landscapes that are usually found in Watteau's fêtes galantes.
For three centuries, there were numerous attempts to identify the subject and the characters represented by Watteau; various authors thought the painting to be either a theatrical scene featuring commedia dell'arte masks, or a group portrait of Watteau's contemporaries. Beginning from the late 20th century, Russian and Western sources accept a theory developed within the Hermitage Museum that holds the painting to be a group portrait of the Comédie-Française players who performed in the playwright Florent Carton Dancourt's play The Three Cousins. Given a variety of available interpretations, the painting has been known under a number of various titles; its traditional naming is derived from anonymous verses, with which the painting was published as an etching in the 1730s.
By the mid-18th century, Actors of the Comédie-Française belonged to , a nephew of the Parisian merchant and art collector Pierre Crozat; as part of the Crozat collection, the painting was acquired in 1772 for Empress Catherine II of Russia. Since then the painting was among Russian imperial collections in the Hermitage and, later, in the Gatchina Palace, before entering the Hermitage again in the 1920s; as part of the museum's permanent exhibition, it remains on display in the Winter Palace.
Description
Actors of the Comédie-Française is an oil painting on a pearwood panel that measures approximately 20 by 25 cm. The painting is a compact half-length composition that shows five figures standing around a high wooden balustrade; most of the figures can be related to extant drawings, either directly or through comparable studies in Watteau's body of work. It has been noted by scholars that the half-length representation of Watteau's painting was influenced by Venetian painting;, saying of the composition, states its similarity to these found in Giorgione and Titian's art. , also mentions the Venetian influence on the half-length representation of figures which, according to Zeri, was unusual to Watteau, bringing out the portrait aspect of the painting. , defines the composition in what is called "hidden simplicity" of the figures' smooth, circle-based layout, stating that Venetian painting influenced not only the composition of Watteau's painting, but also its later reception; in a footnote, Actors of the Comédie-Française is compared to Titian's painting The Concert, also cited as an example of portrait turned genre painting. influences from French school such as the Le Nain brothers and Watteau's master Claude Gillot, names The Coquettes among works that "are all more or less influenced by Gillot, some of whose figures Watteau has introduced unchanged into his pictures." are also cited.
The rightmost figure is an outwardly old man dressed in a skullcap; he leans on a cane in the left hand, while holding a mushroom hat in the right hand. The figure is generally associated with an early full-length sanguine study ( 64; 75), published as an etching engraved by Jean Audran ( 157); the earlier version of the subject was introduced by Watteau in Marriage Contract and Country Dancing (now in the Prado, Madrid) and L'Accordee du Village (now in Sir John Soane's Museum, London). It has been noted, however, that the study is probably a reduced version of a larger, more vibrant study drawn from life, similar to other studies such as the ones located in the British Museum, London (PM 84; RP 130), and in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (PM 53; RP 135), respectively. Given the rendering of the hand holding the cane and the quality of the man's face, it has been suggested that Watteau relied on additional drawings for the painting.
By the balustrade's other side, a young girl is shown in a lightly colored, striped dress with ruff, standing behind a black boy servant in green-striped clothes; over the girl's shoulder, a head of a young man, dressed as Mezzetino, appears in a large motley beret. The girl and the boy's figures are usually related to a Louvre sheet of eight head studies, with the boy's head directly adopted into the Hermitage painting; the girl's figure is also thought to be related to the Louvre drawing, exactly a girl's head notably used in a version of The Embarkation for Cythera located in the Charlottenburg Palace. Young people of color were a recurrent theme in Watteau's paintings and drawings, possibly influenced by works of Paolo Veronese; these are also present in Les Charmes de la vie (Wallace Collection, London), La Conversation (Toledo Museum of Art), and Les Plaisirs du Bal (Dulwich Gallery, London). The head of the young man has no directly related drawings, but is notably present, with slight differences, in The Italian Comedians now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the figure has also been associated by Nemilova with a head on a sheet of studies located in a private collection in New York City (PM 746; RP 456) and, to a lesser success, with a figure from a sheet now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (PM 665; RP 475), while thought the head to be related with Il Capitano's figure present in the Louvre-owned Pierrot.
Opposite to the old man, the leftmost figure is a young woman turned to the right in profile, wearing Polish-styled red dress and white chipper, leaning on the balustrade and holding a black mask in the right hand; from the X-ray analysis, it has been found that she was to be bareheaded, wearing a different attire, and had to have her mask placed on the balustrade rather than holding it. Similarly to the old man's figure, the woman's figure has been related to an early, small, full-length study (RP 44) of a similarly dressed yet differently posed woman, that has been adopted into a more detailed drawing, later used in The Polish Woman, traditionally but not definitively attributed to Watteau (now in the National Museum, Warsaw). Various studies of women's hands holding masks have been related to the painting, with a study in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (PM 828; RP 417), regarded as the closest. There is also a now untraced sanguine and black chalk study of the woman and the boy (PM 541; RP R591) that closely corresponds, albeit in reverse, with the painting; Parker and Mathey, who attributed the drawing to Watteau, considered it to be a preliminary study, and so did Nemilova and, during the 1984–1985 exhibition, Rosenberg; however, Eidelberg rejected that relation, as well as the sheet's authenticity, pointing out that the drawing is more corresponding to the etching rather than to the painting; in the 1996 catalogue raisonné, Rosenberg and Louis-Antoine Prat also list the sheet as rejected.
The painting is generally in good condition, despite losses and restorations undergone in the past. : "Similar to many other Watteau paintings, this one has undergone repaintings which have altered their quality;" : "Despite losses and restorations, it is in remarkably good condition." Damages found by visual observations include a restored crack along the old man's cloak, to the right; cracks in shaded areas, more importantly along the lower edge and around the girl's head; and a loss painted in above the girl's left shoulder. X-ray analysis of the painting, performed by the Hermitage scholars in the 1970s, also revealed alterations made to the leftmost figure during the painting's production: the woman was to be bare-headed rather than wearing the bonnet, and was to wear a free-flowing costume with horizontal stripes, different from a Polish-styled one found in the final painting; her hand didn't hold the mask, but lay on the banister.; .
Identity of the subject Until the middle of the 20th century, sources and studies on Watteau variously defined the work's subject. In notes to Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi's Abecedario pittorico, Pierre-Jean Mariette referred to the work as Coquettes qui pour voir galans au rendez vous (), after the first verses of quatrains accompanying Thomassin's engraving for the Recueil Jullienne; Mariette thought the panel depicts "people in disguise for a ball, among whom is one dressed as an old man." François-Bernard Lépicié refers to the composition as Retour de Bal in a 1741 obituary of , believing the figures to be returning from a ball; in contrary, Catalogue Crozat of 1755 and Dezallier d'Argenville fils described it as a depiction of masked figures preparing for a ball.
Later sources, more prominently in France and Russia, similarly had various definitions on the subject: refers to the work as en masques () in the manuscript catalogue of the Hermitage collection; Cat. no. 873. the Hermitage's 1797 catalogue features the title The Mascarade, Cat. no. 2545. whereas the 1859 inventory registry features only the work's description—"two women, talking with two men, and a negro beside them". Cat. no. 1699 In his writings, referred to the work as Le Rendez-vous du bal masqué, See also before Edmond de Goncourt's Catalogue raisonné... introduced the Mariette-mentioned title into common use.
In an 1896 article published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the French author Gaston Schéfer was the first to consider The Coquettes to be based on portrait drawings rather than being a theatrical scene. Schéfer suggested from an inscription under Boucher's etching after the Berlin drawing, found in a copy of Figures des differents caracteres held by the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, that the old man on the right of the painting was modelled after Pierre-Maurice Haranger, a canon of the Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois who was a close friend of Watteau; the lady in red was thought by Schéfer to be the Comédie-Française actress Charlotte Desmares, based on comparison of the composition with Lepicié's etching of her portrait by Charles-Antoine Coypel. Later in the early 1900s, playwright Virgile Josz presumed the painting to be a depiction of commedia dell'arte masks, with the old man as Pantalone, the women as Rosaura and Isabella, and the young man as Scapino; in later years, these points were adopted by a number of scholars Josz's contemporary Louis de Fourcaud considered figures to be a family group dressed for an elegant masquerade."
In a 1950 monograph on Watteau, Hélène Adhémar identified the lady in red as Charlotte Desmares, similarly to Schéfer; Adhémar's point was furthered in Karl Parker and Jacques Mathey's 1957–1958 catalogue of Watteau drawings; they concluded that the old man could be another Comédie-Française player, Pierre Le Noir. In the Soviet Union, the Hermitage staff member Inna Nemilova supported these points, and also concluded the young man to be Philippe Poisson. In addition, Nemilova pointed out Desmares could be possibly depicted by Watteau in both versions of The Embarkation for Cythera, and also other canvas and various drawings.
Provenance