Fête in a Park

The war over who would sit on the Spanish throne ended with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and Watteau painted this small canvas in roughly those two years, 1712 and 1713. Nothing in it suggests a war. Well-dressed men and women sit and talk in a park where the statues and the trees blur into the same soft air. The picture reached Spain through the royal household. Philip V, the Bourbon who kept the throne at Utrecht, married the Parmese princess Isabel de Farnesio, and she built one of the largest private collections in Europe at the palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, where this canvas is recorded in the inventory of 1746. Her collection mark, a small fleur-de-lis, is painted into the lower right corner, and an old inventory number in white sits at the lower left.