Holy Family

Watteau made his name painting the fete galante, elegant companies drifting through parkland in silk, flirting and playing music. A religious picture from his hand is almost unheard of, and this Holy Family is nearly the only one that survives. He painted it around 1719, when his health was already failing; he would die of tuberculosis two years later, at 36. The Virgin, the Christ Child and Joseph rest in a landscape with small putti overhead, the kind of soft wooded setting Watteau used for his garden parties, now turned to a quiet sacred scene. It stayed with his close friends after his death, then passed into the collection of Count von Bruhl in Dresden. In 1769 Catherine the Great bought that collection for her new Hermitage, which is how a rare devotional work by the painter of Parisian pleasure ended up in Saint Petersburg.