The Scale of Love

The Scale of Love, painted around 1717 and now in the National Gallery in London, depicts a musical courtship scene in a garden. The title plays on the double meaning of the word 'scale' — both a musical scale and the weighing of feelings — capturing the characteristic Watteau fusion of music and love. A guitarist serenades a companion who listens with enigmatic attention, in a scene where nothing is stated openly and everything is implied through gesture and glance. Watteau had been elected to the Académie royale in 1717 under the novel category of peintre de fêtes galantes, a designation that recognized both his originality and his resistance to existing academic categories. His musical scenes are among the finest expressions of this new genre: intimate, poetic, and suffused with an awareness that all pleasure is fleeting. He painted with luminous oil brushstrokes over careful preparation, achieving the shimmering surface that makes his silks seem to breathe. The Scale of Love reached the collection of George IV and later passed to the National Gallery, where it remains one of the most admired French Rococo paintings outside France.

The guitar-playing suitor and his companion are rendered with extraordinary refinement, their silk costumes catching light in Watteau's distinctive shimmering brushwork. The garden setting provides an atmospheric backdrop of greens and golds.