L’Île de Cythère (The Island of Cytherea)

Despite his having been one of Antoine Watteau’s most dedicated imitators, Quillard remains something of a mystery and no clear account of his relationship with Watteau exists. His first biographer, Père Orlandi (1753), described him as a ‘disciple’ of Watteau who followed the older artist’s manner. If recent attempts to situate the ten-year-old Quillard as a collaborator in Watteau’s ‘studio’ are not entirely persuasive, Martin Eidelberg’s assertion that Quillard contributed four or five highly characteristic figures to the background of Watteau’s Le Contrat de Mariage (Madrid, Prado) is certainly correct, and it appears that the young artist had access to some of Watteau’s earliest drawings, which he copied. Born in Paris, the son of a cabinet maker, Quillard displayed a precocious talent that was apparently recognized by the abbé de Fleury, tutor of young Louis XV, who awarded the artist an annual pension of 200 livres. Competing unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in 1723 – the recipient was the 20-year-old Boucher – he made a second attempt the following year when the prize was awarded to Carle van Loo. Thwarted in his efforts to pursue the training of a history painter in Rome under the Academy’s aegis, Quillard left Paris for Lisbon in 1726 to accompany the Swiss naturalist Charles-Frédérik Merveilleux, who had been commissioned to write a natural history of Portugal: Merveilleux hired the artist to provide the illustrations for his book. In Lisbon, Quillard’s talents were recognized by King John V, who appointed him court painter in 1727. During the next six years he was active in all aspects of artistic life, producing fêtes galantes in the manner of Watteau and portraits in the emerging Rococo style, as well as painting large altarpieces, state portraits, and ceiling decorations (much of which were destroyed during the Lisbon earthquake of 1755). Quillard died in Lisbon of an unspecified illness, age 29.

Martin Eidelberg has been assiduous over many years in reconstructing Quillard’s oeuvre as both a painter and draftsman: in gathering together a substantial corpus of the artist’s works – which had been, more often than not, misattributed to Watteau or another of his followers – Quillard’s distinctive hand and artistic personality have been revealed. The Aitken L’Île de Cythère was sold several times in the first half of the 20th century as a painting by Watteau depicting that artist’s most celebrated subject. However, it had appeared earlier in several 18th-century Paris auctions where it was correctly identified as by Quillard (or ‘Tillard’, as his name was scrambled by the auctioneers). When it came up for sale in the collection of J-A Gros (father of Baron Gros, the painter) on 13 April 1778, lot 42, paired with a (lost) pendant of bathers on a riverbank, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin made a rapid sketch of it and its companion in the margin of his catalogue and noted – incorrectly – that Quillard was an 'élève de Lancret, mort à Rome'. Both the misspelling of his name and the error regarding the identity of his mentor and place of death suggest how quickly Quillard had been forgotten.

Although it was described in the Gros sale as ‘An Island with a Barque’, its subject clearly reflects the influence of Watteau’s Cythera, a theme which Quillard returned to frequently in his paintings. As in Watteau’s famous reception piece, a boat with Love’s pilgrims sails toward an island filled with other couples who are flirting on the grassy banks and awaiting the barque’s arrival. The setting is sylvan: calm blue waters, sunny skies, distant mountains, grand sheltering trees, a hound chasing elegant swans in flight. Quillard’s reliance on Watteau’s example suggests that this is among his early works, made when the relationship between the two painters was still fresh, circa 1720-1725, and before his departure for Portugal. Despite his dependence on the master, the mood in Quillard’s painting is one of unalloyed pleasure and delight: his happy pilgrims partake of none of Watteau’s nostalgia or melancholy.

A horizontal, red chalk drawing of a fête galante by Quillard in the Musée Saint-Denis, Reims, includes in its lower left-hand corner a study of a boat being rowed by an oarsman who leans back and turns his head sharply over his shoulder to assess how close he is to shore. This compositional study was made in preparation for one of the artist’s rare etchings, but Quillard looked to it again in painting the oarsman in the Aitken L’Île de Cythère.

We are grateful to Martin Eidelberg, who examined the painting in the Aitken collection and confirmed its attribution to Quillard.