Livre de pieces pour la Guittarre
Dedié au Roy
Composé par R. de Visée
Suite en ré mineur 1686
Guitars made by Hans Meijer 1990
Jean-Antoine Watteau Project
Robert de Visée (ca. 1655 – 1732/1733) was a lutenist, guitarist, theorbist and viol player at the court of the French kings Louis XIV and Louis XV, as well as a singer and composer for lute, theorbo and guitar.
Jean-Antoine Watteau was born in the town of Valenciennes in October 1684, [which had recently passed from the Spanish Netherlands to France. His father, Jean-Philippe Watteau (died 1720), was a tiler whose brawling is documented fact. Showing an early interest in painting, Jean-Antoine may have been apprenticed to Jacques-Albert Gérin, a local painter. Jean-Antoine's first artistic subjects were charlatans selling quack remedies on the streets of Valenciennes. Watteau left for Paris in about 1702. There he found employment in a workshop at Pont Notre-Dame, making copies of popular genre paintings in the Flemish and Dutch tradition; it was in that period that he developed his characteristic sketchlike technique.
In 1703 he was employed as an assistant by the painter Claude Gillot, whose work represented a reaction against the turgid official art of Louis XIV's reign. In Gillot's studio Watteau became acquainted with the characters of the commedia dell'arte (its actors had been expelled from France several years before), a favorite subject of Gillot's that would become one of Watteau's lifelong passions. Afterward he moved to the workshop of Claude Audran III, an interior decorator, under whose influence he began to make drawings admired for their consummate elegance. Audran was the curator of the Palais du Luxembourg, where Watteau was able to see the magnificent series of canvases painted by Peter Paul Rubens for Queen Marie de Medici. The Flemish painter would become one of his major influences, together with the Venetian masters he would later study in the collection of his patron and friend, the banker Pierre Crozat.
Watteau died in 1721.
A costume design for Louis XIV
as The Rising Sun, from the final
entrée of Le Ballet de la Nuit (1653).
Robert de Visée (ca. 1655 – 1732/1733)
Prélude - copy Delaplanque guitar
Allemande - copy Delaplanque guitar
Courante - copy Antonio Stradivari 1688
Sarabande - copy Delaplanque guitar
Gavotte - copy Delaplanque guitar
Bourée - copy Delaplanque guitar
Menuet I & II - copy Antonio Stradivari 1688
Passacaille - copy Antonio Stradivari 1688
Gigue - copy Antonio Stradivari 1688
Hans Meijer 1991 - Delaplanque guitar
