Jean-Antoine Watteau: 8 works

'As a young man, Watteau came to Paris from Valenciennes, a Flemish town that had recently come under French rule. In the French capital he painted decorative and theatrical subjects, and soon made his mark as the inventor of the fête galante, in which fashionable figures engaged in the rituals of love in a parkland setting.'

'In the painted versions, Watteau has embellished the woman's head with a coiffure and hat, and she is shown with her eyes cast further downward at her seated companions, with a more idealized visage than in this robust study from life.'

'Her male dancing partner is Nicolas Vleughels, a Flemish painter, who was Watteau's friend and landlord.'

'Watteau is best known for his rapidly executed figure studies in trois crayons, using red, black, and white chalks. This sheet is an exceptional example of his mastery of the technique and embodies such immediacy and energy that one does not notice at first that the artist did not include the lower half of the woman's right leg and foot and failed to indicate the base on which she is seated.'

'X-ray images show that Watteau painted The Love Lesson on a coach door bearing a coat of arms with two unicorns and the crown of a marquis.'

'This tension between illusion and reality is typical of Watteau and influenced a generation of his followers to explore the relationships between painting and theater.'

'Using only two colors of chalk, Watteau depicted the Savoyard's shrewd, humorous face, his tattered clothing, and his bulky paraphernalia with remarkable precision, sensitivity, and humanity. Of the ten extant studies of Savoyards by Watteau, four appear to portray the same salty character seen here.'

'A copy with variations, notably in the right foreground, of Watteau's Retour de Campagne, lost but known in Cochin's engraving of 1727.'