The Judgment of Paris

This Judgment of Paris, around 1718, in the Louvre, treats the classical myth in which the Trojan prince chose Venus as the most beautiful goddess. Watteau transforms the mythological subject into an intimate, almost domestic scene, stripping it of the grandiose rhetorical treatment favored by academic painters. 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.

The three goddesses are rendered with Watteau's characteristic delicate modeling, their nude forms harmonized with the surrounding landscape. The soft, luminous palette and intimate scale distinguish this from the heroic treatment of the subject by earlier painters.