Nicolas Lancret

Nicolas Lancret trained where Watteau had trained, in the Paris studio of Claude Gillot, the theatre designer. He was never Watteau's pupil, though the two met around 1712 and grew friendly, and Lancret took up the same world of well-dressed couples idling in parkland, the fete galante.

Then his luck turned on two deaths. Watteau died in 1721 and Gillot in 1722, and Lancret was suddenly the leading supplier of the pictures fashionable Paris wanted. He worked fast, invented freely, and stayed more literal than Watteau, filling his scenes with recognisable games, dances, and children, and warming the colour.

The commissions came from the top. Louis XV hung his work and Frederick the Great of Prussia collected it in quantity, and he is credited with something like 700 paintings. One subject he returned to was the dancer Marie Salle, painted mid-step, a portrait of a real performer rather than a type.