Love in the French Theatre

This Love in the French Theatre, around 1716, in the Gemäldegalerie Berlin, depicts a scene from the Comédie-Française. Watteau produced paired paintings of Italian and French theatrical traditions, exploring the different styles of performance that influenced his understanding of gesture and emotion. 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 actors are shown in formal theatrical costume, their gestures more restrained than those of the Italian comedians. Watteau's rendering of the elaborate French costumes creates rich surface textures in gold, red, and blue.