The Dreamer

Watteau painted this small panel around 1713, when Paris was gripped by a fashion for all things Turkish. He dressed his seated young woman in a made-up Eastern costume, a red gown trimmed with fur and a white bonnet, the sort of outfit that turned up on the stage he loved. She looks down and away, lost in thought, which is why a printmaker who later copied the picture called it The Dreamer, the name that stuck. Watteau built his short career on these quiet, theatrical figures. He was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him at 36, a few years after this was made.