Company in a Park

In August 1717 the French Royal Academy of Painting admitted Antoine Watteau as a full member, and when its secretary entered his reception piece, the Pilgrimage to Cythera, in the minutes, the subject was recorded as a fête galante, a gallant party. The term stuck to the kind of picture Watteau had made his own, elegant men and women at leisure in parkland, talking, flirting, listening to music. This large canvas, 127 by 192 centimetres, repeats a Watteau composition of that kind, painted by another, unnamed hand. The museum records neither a date nor the name of the copyist.