The Shop Sign of Gersaint

Watteau's The Shop Sign of Gersaint of 1720 was painted in two weeks for his friend the art dealer Gersaint as a literal shop sign — a large canvas depicting the activity of an art gallery, with fashionable customers examining paintings being packed and displayed. The work is recognized as his masterpiece of social observation: the gallery setting allowed him to document the contemporary art market, the social theater of connoisseurship, and the complex relationship between art objects and the people who purchase them. Painted months before his death from tuberculosis, the work's vitality and freshness are extraordinary.

Watteau's fluid, confident brushwork renders the gallery interior and its occupants with extraordinary luminosity and spatial depth. The warm palette and the shimmering treatment of silk costumes and framed paintings demonstrate his supreme mastery of oil painting in his final months.