The Embarkation for Cythera

Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera of 1717, his reception piece for the Royal Academy that inaugurated the fête galante genre, depicts an aristocratic company preparing to leave — or arriving at — the island of Venus, mythology's realm of love. The painting's ambiguity — departure or arrival, real or imagined, joy or melancholy — has generated centuries of scholarly debate. The couples progress from left to right, from conversation to movement to departure, the sequence suggesting the progression of love from beginning through consummation toward loss. The painting was considered so original that the Academy invented a new genre category — fête galante — to classify it.

Watteau's shimmering brushwork creates an atmosphere of golden, autumnal light that envelops the elegant figures and the dreamlike landscape. The subtle gradation from warm foreground to cool, misty distance creates a spatial poetry that has never been surpassed.