Die Serenade

A lone musician in a rose costume sits in a landscape, bent over his guitar as he tunes it. Watteau painted him on a panel barely larger than a page, and the little picture passed through a long line of collectors before reaching Chantilly.

The story behind the painting

The Chord, also called The Serenader or Mezzetino, is an oil on panel by Antoine Watteau, now in the Musée Condé at Chantilly. Its date has long been debated. Hélène Adhémar placed it in spring to summer 1716, Jacques Mathey around 1714, Ettore Camesasca around 1715, Marianne Roland Michel around 1715 to 1716, and Renaud Temperini around 1716 to 1717. Wikidata gives 1715. Scholars agree it belongs to the middle years of Watteau's career. The guitarist is widely linked with Mezzetino, a character of the Italian commedia dell'arte and a recurring figure in Watteau's art.

What to look for

This is a small vertical panel, about 24 by 17 cm in Wikipedia; Wikidata gives 24 by 17.5 cm. It shows a single full-length figure: a male guitarist in theatrical costume, seated in a landscape and tuning his guitar. His head is turned to the left and bare. He wears a rose-coloured coat and knee-breeches slashed with yellow, trimmed with blue ribbons, and shoes with blue rosettes. Notice how the soft colours of the costume stand out against the landscape, and how the whole picture is built around one quiet gesture of tuning.

Meaning and intent

Watteau returned to this guitarist again and again. The figure is based on a red and black chalk drawing in the Louvre, and it also appears in two other paintings, The Surprise at the Getty Museum and Pleasures of Love in Dresden. Preparatory drawings are kept in Rouen, at the Petit Palais and at the Louvre. The painting has often been confused with Watteau's Mezzetin in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which shows the same theatre character, yet the two figures do not share the same physique at all.

Legacy

The recorded history begins in the mid-18th century with the tax farmer Marin Delahaye, at whose estate sale in Paris on 1 January 1754 it was described as a painting on wood representing Mezzetin by Watteau. It then passed through the dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun, husband of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the auctioneer Antoine Claude Chariot and the dealer Alexandre Joseph Paillet, before resurfacing at auction in 1824. The Marquis Maison owned it until 1868, when Henri d'Orléans, Duke of Aumale, acquired it. He bequeathed his Chantilly collection to the Institut de France in 1884.