The Scale of Love

Louis the Fourteenth died in 1715 after 72 years on the throne, and the heavy grandeur of his Versailles gave way to something lighter and more private under the Regency that followed. Watteau's small pictures of couples flirting with music in parkland are the images of that shift in mood, and this is one, painted around 1717. A man in fantasy costume tunes his guitar toward a woman holding a sheet of music, a scene poised somewhere between a lesson and a seduction. Watteau looked hard at real things even here. The guitar is an accurate Paris instrument of the kind the Voboam family made, though the notes on the page are invented, nothing anyone could actually play. It is the only painting by Watteau in London's National Gallery.