Assembly in a Park

Watteau usually drew without a particular painting in mind. He filled sheets with chalk studies of people standing, sitting and turning away, and when he began a picture he went back to that stock and chose his cast. This small walnut panel from around 1716 or 1717 shows how. The strolling couple at the left began as two separate studies, the woman on a sheet now at the Getty in Los Angeles, the man on a drawing in the Louvre. Only here did they become a pair. After Watteau died in 1721, his friend the collector Jean de Jullienne had hundreds of his drawings engraved, and the studies for two of the children here, the girl standing with her back to us and the one lying on the grass, are known only from those prints. On the far right, a flute player is half hidden by the bushes.