Rococo

Antoine Watteau

Pèlerinage à l'île de Cythère

1717

Oil on canvas, 50 3/4 × 76 1/2 in. Musée du Louvre, Paris

A wooded hillside, a boat waiting below and couples in silk doing nothing a history painter would call a subject.

Look at

• The figures keep to the lower half; above them sky, hills and lake dissolve in blue-grey haze, so mood outweighs event.
• The couples form a chain from right to left — seated, rising, walking — and the eye moves across the hill like a slow procession.
• The paint is thin and feathery in trees and sky and thick only in the silks.

• Delivered in 1717 as the reception piece that made Watteau an Academician; the minutes struck out his title and wrote in "une feste galante", a term that later named the genre.
• Hung in the Academy's assembly room in the Louvre through the eighteenth century; seized with its collection in 1795.

Fête galante

a scene of elegant company at leisure outdoors, the subject Watteau made his own.

Reception piece

the work an artist submitted to be admitted to the Académie royale.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain