The Dance

The Dance, painted in 1730 and now at the Worcester Art Museum, places communal dancing at the centre of an outdoor gathering in the manner that had been explored by Watteau and was becoming a standard component of Rococo park scene imagery. Dancing was the quintessential aristocratic social art — a physical embodiment of grace, rhythm, and mutual attention — and its depiction in painting carried implications about the cultivation and refinement of those who participated. Pater's 1730 dance scene may have been conceived as a pendant to a more static conversation or bathing scene, as dancing subjects frequently served as the active, mobile half of paired compositions. The Worcester Art Museum's holding places this work within the American collection context where French Rococo works entered strongly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The dance subject required Pater to capture arrested motion in a medium that cannot move, and he achieved this through tilted postures, extended limbs, and the deployment of musical instruments visible at the edges of the scene to imply the ongoing sound that drives the movement. His brushwork in the dancers' costumes is more fluid and gestural than in his static figure groups.