The Embarkation for Cythera

Everyone knows the grand version of this subject, the one Watteau delivered to the French Academy in 1717 and now a pride of the Louvre. This is the earlier attempt, painted around 1709 or 1710, when he was still in his twenties and largely unknown. The theme is the same: figures gathering to sail for Cythera, the island where the goddess of love was said to have come ashore, a kind of collective daydream of courtship. Here the treatment is plainer and more direct than in the later masterpiece, closer to an ordinary garden party. Watteau was in the middle of inventing a whole category of painting for scenes like this, the fete galante, well-dressed people idling and flirting in parkland, which the Academy would eventually create a special class to admit him under.