A Halt During the Chase

Watteau made this in the last years of his short life; he died of consumption in 1721, only 36. It is called a hunt, and there are guns and dogs, but almost nobody in it is hunting. The riders and their companions are dressed for a fashionable afternoon, some in the clothes of Watteau's own day, some in older, 17th-century dress, gathered on the grass as if the chase were only a reason to be outdoors together. This was the world Watteau had more or less invented in paint, the fête galante, an elegant party in a park, taking shape in the tired last stretch of Louis the Fourteenth's reign. The young man with the gun at the left he lifted straight from an old print by the Italian Pietro Testa.