Elegant company

Elegant Company, dated 1716 on panel and held in the Wallace Collection, belongs to the productive year just before Watteau's remarkable 1717, and shows his mature compositional approach already fully established: a group of fashionably dressed figures in an outdoor setting that is simultaneously specific and indefinite, engaged in the leisure activities — conversation, music, promenading — that constitute the entire subject matter of the fête galante. By 1716 Watteau had refined his palette toward the silvery, cooler register he would maintain for his remaining five years, and the panel works of this year show his technical command at its most assured. The Wallace Collection panel group across 1716–1718 represents one of the greatest concentrations of Watteau's work in a single institution and invites reading each work as a variation within a sustained artistic meditation on the quality of human happiness.

Panel support at the Wallace Collection's characteristic intimate scale. The 1716 palette shows Watteau's mature cooler range — silvery greens and blues in the landscape, warm but controlled costume colors. The panel's rigid surface allowed precise placement of the very fine highlights on silk and lace that give his fashionable figures their characteristic shimmer. The spatial arrangement of the group balances conversational clusters with open foreground space.