BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online Enabling Open Access to Birkbeck’s Research Degree output Making the crossing : seduction, space and time in the art of Jean-Antoine Watteau and William Hogart https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/44593/ Version: Full Version Citation: Tambling, Kirsten Yvonne (2019) Making the crossing : se- duction, space and time in the art of Jean-Antoine Watteau and William Hogart. [Thesis] (Unpublished) c 2020 The Author(s) All material available through BIROn is protected by intellectual property law, including copy- right law. Any use made of the contents should comply with the relevant law. Deposit Guide Contact: email Making the Crossing: Seduction, Space and Time in the Art of Jean- Antoine Watteau and William Hogarth Volume One: Text Kirsten Yvonne Tambling Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD History of Art Birkbeck, University of London August 2018 1 DECLARATION I confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been de- rived from other sources, this has been indicated. Kirsten Yvonne Tambling 2 ABSTRACT This thesis asks how seduction is addressed in the work of Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) and William Hogarth (1697-1764), in the context of early eighteenth-century cross-Channel relationships. Literally meaning ‘leading astray’, seduction in the eighteenth century had resonances for sexuality, gender, morality, politics and aesthetics. This thesis uses a broad methodology, drawing on literary and social history, as well as the history of art, to provide an overview of seduction’s parameters, and to address its implications on both sides of the Channel. Focus- ing on the period c.1700-40, when the work of both Watteau and Hogarth was at its most in- fluential, it asks how these artists addressed seduction across these contexts. The thesis thus contributes to current scholarship on both Watteau and Hogarth, showing seduction to have been a key concern for each. Addressing Hogarth’s ‘Progress’ format and paintings alongside Watteau’s fêtes galantes, theatrical paintings and L’Enseigne de Gersaint (1720-21), it deals, in turn, with courtship in idyllic outdoor locations, with the legitimate (and illegitimate) temptations of the eighteenth-century city, and with the illusionistic con- text of the theatre. In juxtaposing two ‘canonical’ artists whose lives, though related, did not significantly over- lap, this thesis not only addresses both England and France during the early eighteenth cen- tury, but also interrogates the implications of juxtaposition as a methodology. Drawing on contemporary curatorial practice, including the increasingly common paired format of a number of twenty-first century exhibitions, it asks what academic art history might gain from these examples. It shows that juxtaposing Hogarth and Watteau can allow us to see these much-studied artists afresh, and to problematise some of the historical assumptions surround- ing them—Watteau the ‘poetic’ dreamer; Hogarth the pugnacious satirist—as well as calling attention to aspects of the art of each that are less evident when looked at individually. 3 CONTENTS Volume 1 Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 6 Notes to the reader 8 Introduction: Juxtaposition and Seduction 9 Part I: 61 ‘Shifting from Scene to Scene’: Seduction in the Landscape Chapter 1: ‘Un labyrinthe, où l’on s’égare facilement’: 67 Embarking for Cythera Chapter 2: ‘The thickest part of the grove’: 105 Hogarth’s Before and After Part II: 141 ‘Seducing the youthful passengers’: Urban seduction Chapter 3: ‘Mother-Made Matches’: Bawds and Prostitutes 149 Chapter 4: ‘Un vrai coupe-gorge’: Shops and Shopkeepers 189 Part III: 227 ‘Un séducteur aux genoux d’une femme qu’il n’aime pas’: The Theatre Chapter 5: ‘Neither Auditors nor Actors perfectly, and imperfectly both’: 232 Theatrical Audiences Chapter 6: ‘Étourdi par le merveilleux du spectacle’: 272 Pierrot Performing Conclusion: ’A wanton kind of chace’: 305 Seduction in Watteau and Hogarth Bibliography 329 4 Volume 2 List of illustrations 2 Illustrations 14 Appendix I: Translations 102 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In an uncharacteristically warm passage from his often splenetic Anecdotes, William Hogarth acknowledges ‘the partiality with which the world has received my works, and the patron- age and friendship with which some of the best characters in it have honoured the author’.1 I have been fortunate in receiving plenty of both throughout the writing of this thesis, and, with Hogarth, must offer my ‘best thanks’. These are due, firstly, to my expert supervisors, Professor Kate Retford, and Dr Ann Lewis, without whose unflagging guidance, encourage- ment and support I could not have written this thesis—and to the generous patronage of CHASE, and the Birkbeck School of Arts Anniversary Scholarship, without which I could not have undertaken it. With the further funding provided by the London History of Art Society in my second year, I was also able to spend crucial time working in Paris. Further, equally invaluable, support has come from elsewhere in the Birkbeck community: Drs Luisa Calè and Tag Gronberg offered incisive advice and feedback on my work during the upgrade process, as did Professor Lynda Nead and Dr Robert Manuira at Birkbeck’s postgraduate forums. They, and I, were consistently provided for by the practical guidance of Anthony Shepherd and Clare Thomas in the Administrative team at the School of Arts. I must also thank the archivists and staff who assisted me in the institutions I visited: the Print Rooms at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and the British Museum, London; the Gra- ham Robertson Study Room at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Government Art Collection; the British Library; the Warburg Library; Senate House Library, the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art; The National Art Library; UCL Library; Cambridge Uni- versity Library; the Bodleian Library; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the National Archives. In Paris, I must similarly thank the Department of Prints and Draw- ings at the Musée du Louvre; and the staff and archivists of the Petit Palais; the Fondation Custodia; the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, and the Bibliothèque nationale. 1 William Hogarth, Anecdotes of William Hogarth, written by himself…, ed. John Bowyer Nichols (London: J. B. Nichols and Son, 1833), p.49. 6 Before and beyond Birkbeck, I benefitted from the advice, support and teaching of many oth- ers and would therefore also like to acknowledge, from my time at the University of Cam- bridge, my Director of Studies, Sarah Cain, and Drs Caroline Gonda and Philip Connell; and, at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Martin Caiger-Smith and the late Giles Waterfield. Others who have asked, or answered, crucial questions, and for whose time I am immensely grate- ful, include Dr Elizabeth Einberg, Jane Munro, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Dr Nicholas Tro- mans, Jeannie Chapel, Professor Joanne Begiato, Professor David Clarke, and Michael Hall and my anonymous reviewer at the Burlington Magazine. For their practical support, I would like to thank Laura Langelüddecke, who prepared my translations, and Nel Romano, Rosalind Savill and Mia Jackson, who helped me find her. For their further language support, thanks, too, to Dr Colin Niven, Felix Tambling and Stuart Moss, and, for both companionship and fortification, Laura Seymour, Ben Mechen, and my fellow PhD students in the History of Art department at Birkbeck. Final thanks, inevitably the most incommensurate, go to my family: to Pauline and Jeremy Tambling, whose perennial support is always both parental and practical, spanning proof- reading, book-lending, and argument-probing; and to Simon Webb, eternal source of support and sustenance. 7 NOTES TO THE READER Quotations I maintain the grammar, spelling and orthography of all historical citations, in both French and English, using [sic] only where such spellings are liable to cause confusion. All French texts are given in French, with translations provided in Appendix I. Quotations in other lan- guages are translated in the footnotes. Artwork titles I have named artworks either in French or in English, in accordance with the name used by the institution that holds them. Where there is uncertainty (as when an institution uses sev- eral different languages) I have maintained the French titles for Watteau’s work. Britain / England Though my thesis deals in part, though not in whole, with the period after the 1707 Act of Union, it is clear that most of the French writers I cite thought primarily of ‘Angleterre’, the Franco-Scottish relationship having its own complex history. As a result of following the artists I consider and, in places, referring to the pre-1707 period, my thesis does not address Scotland in detail. I have therefore generally favoured ‘England’, except when alluding specifically to Britain—as in the context of national wars, Government Acts, or Hogarth’s ap- propriation as a ‘British artist’ in the nineteenth century, arguably beginning with Allan Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (London: John Murray, 3 vols., 1829). However, as is particularly clear from the nineteenth-century writers I cite, these issues were neither neat nor straightforward. 8 INTRODUCTION Juxtaposition and Seduction In 1719, the thirty-five year old Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) made the journey from Paris to London. He returned to France the following year, but died soon afterwards, on 18 July 1721. Along with his last surviving work, L’Enseigne de Gersaint (fig. 71), he was celeb- rated for what became known as his fêtes galantes—notably his Academy reception piece, Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère (fig. 16)—and hundreds of drawings. Between 1726 and 1739, his friend Jean de Jullienne (1686-1766) commissioned and assembled engravings after much of Watteau’s oeuvre into one of the first catalogues raisonnés: the Recueil Jullienne.1 He observed as he did so that ‘ses tableaux, qui sont montés à un très haut prix, sont encore recherchés aujourd’hui avec beaucoup d’empressement.