French Dauphin presented with an order

In 1710 the royal building office commissioned a set of tapestries on the later reign of Louis XIV, meant to continue the series Charles Le Brun had designed for the king's early years. One scene went to the painter Antoine Dieu, and the young Watteau, still unknown, turned Dieu's drawing into this small painted model. It shows the birth of the king's grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, in 1682. Louis XIV lays the blue ribbon of the Order of the Holy Spirit on the swaddled baby, and the half-drawn bed curtains stand in for the mother. In reality a court official brought the ribbon. The weaving itself never went ahead. The canvas was long thought to have burned, and when Warsaw's National Museum bought it in 1965 it was catalogued as an anonymous French picture. In the mid-1990s the Watteau specialist Martin Eidelberg saw a small reproduction in the museum's journal, went to look at the canvas, and recognised Watteau's own hand.