The Shop Sign of Gersaint

Watteau painted this in 1720 as an actual shop sign, meant to hang outside the Paris gallery of his friend, the art dealer Edme Gersaint. He was gravely ill with tuberculosis and, by Gersaint's own account, finished the whole thing in about a week, working only in the mornings. It shows the inside of the shop, with customers examining pictures. Look to the left, where two workmen are packing a portrait of Louis XIV into a crate. The old king had died five years earlier, and the shop had once traded under his name. So the picture quietly shows one age being boxed away as fashionable Paris turns to browse whatever comes next. Watteau died the following year, in 1721, at 36.