Jean-Antoine Watteau

By 1715 the 72-year reign of Louis XIV had ended, and Paris settled into the lighter, pleasure-seeking mood of the Regency that followed. Jean-Antoine Watteau, a house painter's son from Valenciennes near the Flemish border, caught that mood better than anyone painting in France. In 1717 the French Academy admitted him under a category invented just for him, peintre des fetes galantes, for scenes of elegantly dressed couples flirting and making music in parkland that looked half real and half stage set.

Watteau had tuberculosis for most of his adult life and knew he was dying young. In 1719 he crossed to London hoping the physician Richard Mead, one of the era's most fashionable doctors, could treat him. The English climate and Mead's care did nothing for his lungs, and he came back to France worse than before.

Back in Nogent-sur-Marne, staying with his friend the art dealer Edme Gersaint, he spent a few days in 1720 painting a shop sign for Gersaint's gallery on the Pont Notre-Dame in Paris, a canvas of customers browsing paintings that is now seen as his last major work. He died in Gersaint's arms on 18 July 1721, at the age of 36.