May/June 2009

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Legend has it that Watteau painted the Shopsign in eight mornings, as if he were God creating the world.

Watteau’s last great painting was actually a signboard, displayed for two weeks over the door of a shop on the Pont Notre Dame in 1721. PHOTO: BILDARCHIV PREUSSISCHER KULTURBESITZ/ART RESOURCE, NY

Gersaint’s Shopsign is the greatest work of art ever devoted to shopping. It is an epic of shopping. It is a poetics of shopping. This panoramic view of an interior where paintings and mirrors and clocks and other luxury objects are for sale is “I shop therefore I am,” but reimagined as metaphysics and allegory. Watteau’s cast of characters — twelve in all, eight men and four women — move with the semaphore-like gestures of marionettes; they are puppets in a story of desire. The Shopsign, painted in tones of black, gray, and rose, is at once adamantine and airy — a vision that, despite its funny moments, is strangely somber, almost ritualized. At center stage there is a young man, elegant and ardent and maybe even a little grave, standing just inside the shop, offering his hand to a woman who steps in off the sidewalk, her back side, which is what we see of her, a great shimmer of cloth. Each of the dresses in the Shopsign, and this one in particular, has a gleaming, shivering life of its own — they’re couture creations that function independently of the bodies they contain, they’re lengths of beautifully made and sewn cloth to be played with, petted, adored. The desire for clothes and the desire for flesh melt together, and indeed this is very much a painting about elements that fit into or turn into one another, the nude into the clothed, the bare canvas into the framed masterpiece, the box as a container for a painting or for a set of toiletries, the mirror as a framing of the passing parade, the picture frame that frames not only the painting but the people who look at the painting.

Our feelings about things, our perceptions of things are always multiplying, or at least they are always slipping into other feelings, other perceptions — this is what Watteau wants to tell us. Nothing is only one thing, even, maybe especially the visit to the shop where luxury goods are sold. William Cole, an English visitor to Paris in the 1760s, a generation after the Shopsign was painted, suggests the quotidian experiences that went into Watteau’s composition when he describes Madame Dulac’s “extravagant and expensive shop; where the Mistress was as tempting as the Things she sold.” The beauty of the objects and the beauty of the proprietor could not easily be separated in Cole’s recollections, and of course this is all tumbled together with the fact that even when an object of desire has no direct relationship with sexual desire — when the luxury is, say, a beautifully bound book, an old master drawing, or an especially elegant clock (like the one in Gersaint’s Shopsign) — the pleasure of possession can be so intense as to acquire an erotic dimension. The object that is purchased from Madame Dulac, so Cole explains, is bought not only for itself but “to remember where you bought it” — and from whom.

The luxurious bauble can also have symbolic implications, so that the purchase becomes an endorsement or embrace of certain ideas. There are the Northern Renaissance paintings of the marriage couple making a visit to the jeweler’s, where the gold is being weighed, and all sorts of thoughts about love, loyalty, faithfulness hover in the immaculately rendered air. In Titian’s portraits, the appearance of one of the newly fashionable clocks on a little table is at once a sign of the subject’s great wealth and a memento mori. And then there is the golden bowl, of gilt crystal, after which Henry James named his last completed novel. The secret lovers, Prince Amerigo and Charlotte, are wandering the streets of London and chance upon a “small but interesting dealer in the Bloomsbury street,” where the proprietor shows them the great bowl, with its decoration that is almost Byzantine in its ornamental elaboration. Inside the shop, Charlotte, who is considering buying the bowl as a wedding present for the woman the prince is going to marry, falls into a conversation with the proprietor. “Does crystal then break — when it is crystal?” Charlotte asks. And when she is told that “it splits — if there is a split,” she responds, “Ah! If there is a split. There is a split, eh? Crystal does split, eh?” To which the shopkeeper responds, “On lines and by laws of its own.” And Charlotte replies, “You mean if there’s a weak place?” — at which point we are speaking not about the bowl but about human relationships and human society.

In Gersaint’s Shopsign, Watteau keeps moving from the snapshot of everyday life to the allegorical spectacle and back again, and it is the constant shifting between registers that gives the painting its devious power. Watteau painted the Shopsign near the end of his life, for one of his great friends, the art dealer Edme-Francois Gersaint. It was meant to hang as a sign above the entrance to the shop on the Pont Notre-Dame, Au Grand Monarque, where Gersaint sold paintings and other luxury objects, and it is said to have created a sensation in Paris during the brief time that it actually was displayed out-of-doors. The painting does not represent Gersaint’s actual premises in the arcades of the Pont Notre-Dame, at least that is what the historians tell us. And Watteau would probably have said of this shop much what Henry James later said of the Bloomsbury antiques shop in The Golden Bowl, namely that it “was but a shop of the mind, of the author’s projected world.” The walls of Gersaint’s shop are practically papered with paintings in elaborate frames. These are not miniature versions of actual paintings but rather Watteau’s imaginative variations on the art of the Baroque, a recapitulation of all the passions, sacred and profane, that have kept the world spinning. A resplendent clock reminds us that youth and love will end. Two large mirrors, each a dark abyss, suggest the impossibility of knowing oneself, even as two young men look lovingly at their own images in another mirror. And then there is the elegant lacquerwork toilet set. Who can doubt that toiletries, mirrors, and a clock raise certain questions: Who are we? What can we make of ourselves? What will we become? But the answers to these enormous questions are as remote as the empty room that is glimpsed through the doors at the back of the bustling shop, a room at once outside the main action and at the center of the painting, a room where a nacreous green-gray light, evoked with lightly hatched strokes of paint, dances over a world bereft of people and paintings and objets d’art. (At least one scholar has seen in that empty back room a vision of heaven or paradise, which makes a certain amount of sense.)

Within this elaborately appointed interior, Watteau has set a dozen characters as well as a dog. The Shopsign is a world of doublings, maybe even triplings — a painting about the buying and selling of paintings and other precious objects in which the men and women who have come to shop are themselves the most luxurious objects of all. In that quiet way of his, Watteau makes of this dozen delightful figures a geometric game, giving us four men and one woman on one side of the painting and four men and three women on the other side. He plays with couples — a man and a woman, two men whose looks suggest mirror images — but he also gathers his figures in threes and fours and fives, as if he were a choreographer exploring the full range of physical possibilities. And in addition he plays with a range of social classes, from the workmen to the shopkeepers to the customers, who are either aristocrats or wealthy commoners suddenly hungry for luxuries. So we have three or four classes represented, each of which Watteau treats in the same gently comic manner. Each is part of the passing parade, and of course nothing is fixed, as we are reminded by the workman at the side who is packing a portrait of Louis XIV, recently deceased, into a case, the portrait both alluding to the name of Gersaint’s shop, Au Grand Monarque, and suggesting, at least in our retrospective gaze, the passing of the Sun King’s world. And just as history is constantly changing, so are perceptions, as we see in the most playful incident in the Shopsign, which involves the salesman who is showing a large oval painting of a pastoral landscape with figures to a couple, for while the woman, a dutiful connoisseur, examines the artist’s handling of the great, feathery trees, the man is busy feasting on the female nudes in the foreground. This little anecdote might be labeled: Two ways to look at a painting. And then there are those who have eyes only for themselves. Even as the young shop woman shows off the fine lacquer toilet set, the two men to whom she may be making her sales pitch appear less interested in looking at the toiletries or, for that matter, at the pretty salesgirl than in admiring themselves in a little mirror.

Legend has it that Watteau painted the Shopsign in eight mornings, as if he were God creating the world. For Watteau it was a great new beginning, a dramatic turn from the pastorals that had preoccupied him for so long. But the Shopsign was also done in the twilight of his career, so that its revolutionary zeal was tinged with nostalgia, as if Watteau were saying, “Yes, this is where I might have gone, this is a whole other sort of thing that I might have done.” It is the painting that inaugurates the work of all the painters whom Baudelaire, a century later, would be thinking of when he dubbed Constantin Guys the Painter of Modern Life, but Gersaint’s Shopsign is also the greatest painting of modern life ever done, a premature requiem for the Painter of Modern Life. Some have wanted to see the artist’s self-portrait in the lithe young man at the center of the painting, the man who, with his sharp, bright, dark eyes, is looking so longingly and invitingly at the young woman. The story of the self-portrait, like the story of the painting having been completed in eight mornings, may be apocryphal. But it hardly matters. That young man who is not Watteau is surely the spirit of Watteau. And here he is, reaching out his hand to this woman who is among the last women in Watteau’s art whom we will see from behind. And he invites her to join him in the dance of life, dancing oh! so slowly, as the world passes by.

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