Die Überraschung

Watteau had only a few years left when he painted this around 1718. Tuberculosis would kill him in 1721, before he turned 37, yet the mood here is all ease: a couple lost in a sudden embrace, a small dog, and off to the side a musician in the striped costume of Mezzetin from the Italian comedy, quietly tuning his guitar while the lovers ignore him. The picture was admired in Watteau's own day, then vanished for more than a century. It turned up in 2008 in the corner of a room in an English country house, where a family had owned it since 1848 without knowing what it was. The Getty acquired it in 2017.