NEW ACQUISITION: VIRGINIA MUSEUM'S WATTEAU

VIRGINIANS who turn out next week for the festivities at Richmond's 20-year-old Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will find themselves in an 18th-century garden, strolling past a decorative fountain and wandering among shrubs and period statuary. In a gallery at the end of a vine-covered arbor, they will find the museum's guest of honor and newest pride: a small, gold-framed 12 3/4-in.-by-9 1/2-in. painting, Le Lorgneur or The Sidelong Glance (opposite), by famed 18th-century French Painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. Filling the rest of the gallery will be a loan exhibition of some 50 paintings and drawings by such other 18th-century French painters as Pater, Lancret, Boucher and Fragonard, testimony to the fact that the tone of elegance and grace set by Watteau in his dreamlike scenes of pastoral dalliance and fetes galantes continued straight through his century until the French Revolution.

Virginia Museum Director Leslie Cheek has no doubt that the museum's new Watteau will be a smash hit. Says he: "Virginians traditionally have a fondness for 18th-century decor and architecture." And in Watteau they are getting what Director Cheek calls "probably the most important work of art the Virginia Museum has ever acquired."

Artifice & Nature. Virginia's new Watteau dates from the period when he had first found his own formula for combining artifice with nature. For it was not in the mincing, grandiloquent French courtiers that Watteau found his prototypes but from among the mocking, high-spirited, slapstick players of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte. By placing them against the superb park landscapes he sketched in and around Paris, Watteau created a half-make-believe world of his own that paid homage to nothing but his own poetic imagination.

By the time he painted Le Lorgneur, probably in 1716, Watteau was in his early 30s. Behind him lay an arduous apprenticeship to a Flemish painter in his native Valenciennes and his early struggles as a starving artist in Paris. Then two paintings of French army-camp scenes won him associate membership in the Royal Academy, and the greatest French collector of his time, Pierre Crozat, made room for Watteau in his own house.

Wrinkles in the Sky. In Le Lorgneur Watteau made use of his favorite technique of composition: he riffled through his countless drawings for characters to fit the scene. In this painting, the guitar player is his actor-friend Philippe Poisson. Ironically Watteau, who took great pains with his drawings, usually hurried his painting.

In Le Lorgneur the result was a slight wrinkling of the surface in the upper righthand sky. But Watteau had good reason for haste. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was always in failing health. Once, asked about the future, he replied: "Isn't the hospital the last resort? There, no one is refused admission." Instead it was in a country house outside Paris, where he hoped the fresh air would cure him, that Watteau died at 37.

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