The Feast of Love

The Feast of Love, painted around 1718 and now in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, is one of Watteau's supreme fêtes galantes. The garden setting, musical entertainment, and amorous couples compose an ideal vision of aristocratic pleasure that defined the French Rococo sensibility for generations of artists and collectors. Watteau had invented the fête galante genre for the purposes of his reception into the Académie royale in 1717, and by 1718 he was working at the height of his powers despite advancing tuberculosis. The Dresden work has a warmth and fullness rare even in his oeuvre, with figures in shimmering costumes populating a park centered on a sculptural fountain. He painted with luminous brushstrokes laid over careful preparation, achieving a surface that captures the play of light on silk and the atmosphere of parkland. The composition's golden palette and deep atmospheric recession evoke the Flemish masters — Rubens above all — whose influence Watteau absorbed during his years studying at the Luxembourg Palace. He died in 1721 at thirty-six, and the Feast of Love stands as one of his definitive statements of the world of elegance and transience that he made his own.

Figures in shimmering costumes populate a garden with a sculptural fountain, their groupings creating a serpentine composition through the parkland. The warm, golden palette and atmospheric depth create an effect of paradisal beauty.