If the name of Claude Gillot (1673-1722) is known to everyone outside specialized circles, it is as the teacher of a much more famous artist, Antoine Watteau. Even in the field of 18th century French art history, Gillot’s reputation rests above all on his role as a pioneer of the genres that his famous pupil made his own. As the collector and amateur engraver Jean de Jullienne remarked about Watteau in 1726, the young artist “had a taste for country parties, theater scenes and modern costumes, in imitation of his master”.
The only work by Gillot himself known today is a large canvas in the Louvre (The Two Carriages, 1707) based on a theater scene said to have been inspired by a real-life incident when two cars met head-on in a narrow Parisian street. It is a staging on a painted background, with sedan chairs on wheels serving as carriages. The two ladies in the cars vying for priority are played by characters from the commedia dell’arte, Harlequin and Scaramouche, in disguise. His lively humor is typical of Gillot’s work.
Apart from this painting and a few others associated with Gillot’s name, his surviving work consists entirely of drawings and prints. This fact contributed to its relative obscurity. So does the very thin documentary record of his life and work. So far there has been no comprehensive study of Gillot in English, which makes Jennifer Tonkovich’s book very welcome. Product to accompany an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York (until May 28), it alone stands out as a major work of scholarship.
Tonkovich, the curator of Morgan’s drawings and prints, has painstakingly assembled the evidence to piece together Gillot’s career as far as possible. She challenges the popular belief that he abandoned painting after Watteau left his studio around 1709 because he recognized he could not compete with his former pupil. In fact, Tonkovich points out, Gillot was accepted as a full member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in 1715. He presented a biblical scene as his reception piece, thus gaining admission with the elevated status as a history painter.
Nevertheless, as Tonkovich points out, Gillot’s career centered outside the academy, in the commercial milieu of artists who met the growing demand for decoration and entertainment in Paris during the last decades of Louis’s long reign. XIV (died 1715) and during the Regency which began the reign of Louis XV. Gillot appears to have lived in or near Rue Saint-Jacques, the historic printers’ quarter of Paris. The growing demand for prints provided context for his career. Another is the theater, more specifically the troupe of Italian comedians who operated in the city’s fairgrounds between 1697 and 1716. Sadly, however, Tonkovich is inclined to doubt the long-held identification
of the artist with a certain Gillot who wrote plays and held a puppet
theater of the Saint-Germain fair.
After a first biographical chapter, the book is organized thematically around different aspects of Gillot’s work, which extends to costume and set designs for opera, book illustration and interior design. The bulk of his work, however, consists of drawings of three distinct subjects: the bacchanalia and other scenes of pagan antiquity, the theatrical scenes inspired by the repertoire of the Italian Commedia and the rural scenes that contemporaries called country parties. They were all designed in series, to be collected and kept in groups. Many were engraved, although most prints after his compositions were not published until after his death.
Tonkovich sees Gillot as a decidedly modern figure, with a satirical bent that accords with a typical skeptical Enlightenment view. In significant respects, he seems rather to belong to a premodern world in which art was not yet separated from daily life. In 1715, for example, a Swedish visitor recounts having visited the workshops of two “craftsmen”: one was a painter of carriages, the other was Gillot, then engaged in the design of tapestries.
However, Gillot ended his career in a distressing and modern way: by losing most of his money in the financial collapse of 1720.
- Emma Barker is a lecturer in art history at the Open University
- Jennifer TokovichClaude Gillot: Satire in the Century of Reason, Morgan Museum & Library/Paul Holberton Publishing, 240pp, 275 illustrations, £40/$60 (hb), published in UK February 1, US April 5
- Claude Gillot: Satire in the Age of Reasonuntil May 28, Morgan Museum & Library, New York
