Landscape

Watteau's landscapes are less celebrated than his fêtes galantes, but they reveal his deep study of Flemish and Venetian landscape traditions. This landscape from 1714 at the Hermitage dates from the period when Watteau was developing the poetic, melancholic vision of nature that would infuse his celebrated park scenes with their distinctive atmospheric mood. Jean Antoine Watteau invented the fête galante — elegant figures in park settings pursuing the indefinite pleasures of music, conversation, and love — and in doing so created one of the most distinctive contributions of French painting to the European tradition. His paintings have a quality of melancholy beneath their surface pleasure — the sense that the beautiful afternoon is already ending, that the music will stop, that the perfect moment is always already in the past. This emotional register, combining pleasure and loss in a single sustained note, was both his personal temperament (he died of tuberculosis at thirty-six) and the defining aesthetic quality of the Rococo sensibility he founded.

Feathery tree forms and soft atmospheric tones show Watteau's debt to Rubens's landscapes, with delicate touches of warm color animating the verdant scene in his characteristically refined technique.