Colin Bailey on Getty's Contested Watteau

Head of Pierrot in The Italian Comedians

In 2012 the Getty Museum bought The Italian Comedians, a painting that curator Scott Schaefer attributed to Watteau. Scholars have been split on the attribution, and the Louvre's 2024-25 Watteau exhibition showed the Getty painting as the joint work of Watteau and his follower Jean-Baptiste Pater. Now Morgan Library and Museum director Colin B. Bailey weighs in, in his review of the Louvre catalog for the New York Review of Books. Bailey contends that the Getty's Italian Comedians is entirely by Watteau. He writes:

"A second painting that Watteau made in London, also entitled The Italian Comedians—acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2012—remains controversial. A large canvas with five figures, it shows an engaging, boyish Pierrot, with blond hair and ruddy cheeks, holding out his hat in his right hand as if seeking a donation. To his left, a guitar-playing Mezzetin takes a bow. Harlequin, mustachioed and masked in black, can be seen hiding behind them. There is no question that the beautifully executed central figure of Pierrot is by Watteau. A preparatory drawing for this figure with his outstretched arm in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, shows the actor, but with a pinched and mean-spirited expression quite unlike the sympathetic clown in the finished work. Infrared reflectography has confirmed that Watteau initially followed his drawing and painted Pierrot with precisely the same face but altered the canvas as he completed it. The surrounding figures are not handled as suavely. The faces of the two actors at right are painted more broadly—they might have stepped out of a canvas by Frans Hals. [Guillaume] Faroult, in his discussion of the Getty picture, which he catalogs as “attributed to Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Pater and an anonymous collaborator,” expresses the hope that the “confrontation” with the Louvre’s Pierrot in the exhibition would help resolve the issue once and for all. In fact, as Alan Wintermute first proposed in 2012, seeing the paintings from the National Gallery of Art and the Getty in fairly close proximity made it possible to confirm that they are both by the same hand, undeniably Watteau’s alone."

For background, see Watteau Show Snubs "Italian Comedians" and Paris Ponders a Watteau Puzzle

Antoine Watteau (?), The Italian Comedians, about 1720. Getty Museum

Watteau's other Italian Comedians, about 1720. National Gallery of Art, Washington