The French Comedians

Watteau grew up sketching traveling actors and quacks, and he kept painting the stage right up until he died young, at 36, in 1721. This is one of his last pictures. At first it looks like a solemn moment from a French drama, players posed on a shallow stage in rich costume. But look to the right, where a man is climbing a short flight of stairs up into the group. That is Crispin, a stock comic servant out of Italian farce, a role made famous by the actor Paul Poisson, and he has wandered into the wrong play. His entrance is the joke. Watteau left the picture untitled. Ten years after his death, when an engraving of it was announced for sale in Paris, it was billed as a tragicomedy, French comedians performing something serious and silly at the same moment, and that is the name it still carries.