The Adventuress

This is early Watteau, from about 1713, when he was still in his twenties and inventing the kind of picture he would be remembered for. A young woman in a pink dress and a fur-trimmed cloak stands in a park, one hand on her hip, the other on a cane, listening to a man in costume, a Mezzetin from the Italian comedy, playing a lute on a bench. No one in these scenes is doing anything in particular. They gather, they flirt, they listen to music in the open air. He called such pictures fetes galantes, and the type was largely his own invention. Watteau had little time to develop it. He was consumptive and died in 1721, only 36. Scholars take the version in Troyes, this one, as the original of a composition he later repeated.