The Enchanter

Watteau was still a young man from Valenciennes making his name in Paris when he painted this, one of a pair on small copper panels. His subject was something new: elegant figures gathered in a wooded park, half real party and half scene from the theatre. The type was so unfamiliar that when the Academy finally admitted him in 1717 it invented a category for the occasion, the fete galante. Here a figure plays the enchanter, a magician borrowed from the stage, among companions who seem caught between a real afternoon and a daydream. Its companion piece shows another such gathering. Both hung for years in a country chateau in the Aube, were seized during the Revolution, and came to the museum at Troyes in 1835.