Landscape with a Goat

Watteau never set foot in Italy, yet this little panel looks Italian through and through, a hilltop town above a wooded gorge, a waterfall, and a figure resting with goats in the foreground. It was painted around 1716, when Watteau was studying and copying landscape drawings by 16th-century Venetian artists, Titian and his follower Domenico Campagnola among them, which Paris collectors then owned in large numbers. From those sheets he took the hill towns, the tumbling water and the country figures, and set them down here in warm, loose strokes. Pure landscapes are rare in his work, and this one is barely 26 centimetres high. It was probably the picture sold with the collection of the painter Charles Natoire in 1778. It came to the Louvre in 1937 as a gift from the widow of the American painter Walter Gay.