Art: The Prussian Francophile

Frederick the Great of Prussia, who called himself "the first servant of the state," was as much a tyrant as any monarch of the 18th century, but he liked to say of himself that he was "philosopher by instinct and politician by duty." He was also a patron of the arts. He played the flute to the accompaniment of one of Johann Sebastian Bach's sons; he wrote indifferent poetry under the tutelage of his sometime friend Voltaire; he was an avid collector of paintings and sculpture. In affairs of state, he was Prussian to the bone, but in painting he admired what was foreign.

Last week, in the wing that he built for Berlin's Charlottenburg Castle, the surviving paintings of Frederick's French collection hung under the same roof for the first time (see color). Originally, these paintings were scattered not only through Charlottenburg but also through the old Berlin Castle and the three castles in Potsdam—the New Palace, the Potsdam Castle and Frederick's beloved Sans Souci (Without Care). In later life, Frederick bought Italian and Flemish masterpieces, but in his youth he was probably history's greatest Francophile.

Daylong Philosopher. He wrote in French, spoke French at his own table ("Since my youth I have not read a German book, and I speak it badly"), once consoled a visiting French intellectual by saying: "You don't know German? You are fortunate in your ignorance." He deplored Goethe. He even changed the name of the Prussian Academy to the Academic des Sciences et Belles-Lettres. Voltaire, before his increasing disrespect for authority led him to fall out with Frederick, wrote a doggerel tribute to him: All the morning the great king,

After dinner the great author, All day long philosopher, In the evening host divine.

Of France's painters, Antoine Watteau was Frederick's favorite, just as he had been the favorite in France at the time of the infant Louis XV. With the passing of the young Louis' autocratic father, a reaction had set in against everything grandiose and monumental; nothing could have appealed more to the nobility, so recently released from the blinding authority of the Sun King, than Watteau's languid and worry-free world of harlequins and sultry lovers and frolicking aristocrats. Watteau's shingle for the art dealer Gersaint was apparently done on whim, but it shows him at his most graceful and elegant. Watteau himself boasted of it, and it was one of the last things he painted. A few months after finishing it, he died of consumption at the age of 37.

Sybaritic Society. Watteau influenced most of the painters of his day, but none more than Nicolas Lancret. The pupil painted so much like the master that for a time people could scarcely tell their work apart. Though Lancret was never Watteau's equal, he mirrored the same pretty and fragile world that seemed to have nothing more on its mind than fun and leisure. In favoring mythology, the fashionable Jean François de Troy still kept the mood. His Leda could be any comely marquise languishing in her bath. Everything about the painting—its heavy lushness, its torpor, its sybaritic atmosphere—suggests an overripe society about to go rotten.