Party in the Open Air

Party in the Open Air, one of Watteau's fête galante paintings that established the new genre at the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, presents elegant figures in a park setting in conversation, music, and the indefinite pleasures of aristocratic leisure. The fête galante — Watteau's invented category, accepted by the Academy as a new genre when they received him in 1717 — combined the pastoral tradition, the theatrical costume of the Commedia dell'Arte, and the observation of Parisian aristocratic leisure into something genuinely new: a world of perpetual afternoon pleasure that was simultaneously a fantasy and a document of the culture that sustained it.

The painting demonstrates Watteau's fluid brushwork and shimmering palette, with figures rendered in the characteristic silvery tones and atmospheric haze that distinguish his fêtes galantes from earlier genre painting.