Copy after Jean-Antoine Watteau
The story
Watteau died in 1721, and within five years his friend Jean de Jullienne, who ran a dyeworks at the Gobelins in Paris and collected his art, had begun publishing his work as prints. Between 1726 and 1735 Jullienne paid for some 500 engravings in four volumes, after Watteau's drawings and paintings. The prints carried his parties in parkland far beyond the few people who could own one of the canvases.
Copy after Jean-Antoine Watteau is the label for a repetition of one of his compositions by another hand, usually unnamed. It gives the design to Watteau and the brushwork to someone else, and it says nothing about when the copy was made.
In Munich, the Alte Pinakothek shows a large canvas of elegant company in a park under this label. It came to the Bavarian collection in 1799 from the electoral gallery in Mannheim.
