L'Automne

When conservators at France's national museum laboratory studied this small oval, they found signs of two separate campaigns of painting, with three different blues in the lower layers, lapis lazuli, smalt and a copper blue. Scholars have dated it anywhere from 1713 to 1717, and some connect it with the four oval Seasons Watteau painted for the dining room of the financier Pierre Crozat, in whose house he was living at the time. The count de Caylus, Watteau's friend and biographer, said those Crozat Seasons followed sketches by the older painter Charles de La Fosse. Here a young woman holding a sickle reaches for a basket of fruit, and a small boy carries grapes and peaches in a fold of cloth. Even the title is not Watteau's. It was given by the collector Louis La Caze, who left it to the Louvre in 1869.