The Feast of Love

Louis XIV died in 1715, and France seemed to breathe out. After decades of stiff ceremony at Versailles, the new Regency court wanted lightness and pleasure, and Watteau gave it a whole new kind of picture. He called them fetes galantes, elegant outdoor parties, and had invented the type only a year or two before this one. Here fashionable couples drift and flirt across a park in the late afternoon, watched over by a stone statue of Venus, the goddess of love. Watteau painted these charmed afternoons with the quick, loose, glowing brushwork he took from Rubens. He was also coughing his life away. Tuberculosis would kill him in 1721, a few years after this, at 36.