Claude Audran III

Claude Audran III decorated royal houses in a style that turned into the Rococo, and gave Watteau a job and the run of a gallery. He came from a Lyon family of engravers and painters - his uncle Gerard was the finest reproductive engraver in France - and made his career in the decorative work that the great commissions of Louis XIV's later reign demanded: ceilings, panels and overdoors at Meudon, Marly, Anet and the Menagerie at Versailles. His subject was the arabesque. He took the grotesque ornament of the Renaissance - thin scrolling frameworks peopled with figures, animals and improbable architecture - and lightened it until the framework became the picture rather than the border around one. That lightness is the beginning of the Rococo, and it arrived through decoration rather than through easel painting. In about 1707 he took on a young painter from Valenciennes as an assistant. Antoine Watteau worked for him on decorative schemes, learned the arabesque vocabulary he never entirely abandoned, and - because Audran was keeper of the Luxembourg Palace - was able to study Rubens's Marie de' Medici cycle at length and repeatedly. The colour and handling of Watteau's whole later career come from those canvases. Audran is said to have been reluctant to let him go, which is the ordinary reaction of a workshop master to losing a good hand and, in this instance, an obstacle to the invention of the fete galante. Little of his own painted decoration survives, because the houses were remodelled. He is known now from drawings, and the largest collection of them is in Stockholm.

• Lived: 1658 CE – 1734 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter