Variations on a Garden of Love Mounted
pin-brooch,
2007
Patinated 20ct gold, ebony, opal, silver, 18ct white gold pin materials:
Once more, the evidence left by another’s borrowing has encouraged my own larceny. In this case, the background which Watteau found in the Rubens canvas Garden of Love* tempted him to steal its Arcadian temple for his own Gilles and his Family (Sous un habit de Mezzetin), now in the Wallace Collection, London [P381]. In doing so he was, to my mind, also stealing a little of Rubens’ own personal paradise, for the details in the façade and stonework follow closely those found in the real-life garden of the earlier master’s Antwerp home. For his painting, Watteau has rotated the edifice through 90º and given us a compressed and reduced detail forming, in its seductively loose handling, a kind of painted theatrical back-cloth echoing to the raking play of the guitar and the five voices of Gilles and his Family.
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k e v i n c oat e s : a n ot e b o o k o f p i n s
46mm 38mm mount: mixed media Signed and dated artist’s no: 415.MP-B.07 hidden alchemy: 301 height (without pin): width:
Mine has been a goldsmith’s approach – not usually a friend of ‘loose handling’ – reconstructing the façade of this rusticated temple, and declaring its formal symmetry en face. My Arcadian prospect was found in the dappled tones of an opal and, to repay Watteau in his own stolen coin, I have installed, seated at the threshold of this Garden of Love, the gentle Columbine and her over-amorous suitor from another Wallace Watteau, Harlequin and Columbine [P387]. * Painted c.1630, now at the Prado Museum in Madrid
