The two cousins

When Watteau painted this, the long reign of Louis XIV had just ended. The old king died in 1715, and the France that followed, under a regent, breathed out after decades of ceremony and war. Watteau caught that mood better than anyone. He more or less invented the kind of picture these belong to, the fete galante, small parkland scenes of elegant people drifting between music, courtship and idleness. Here two young women in silk sit with their backs half turned, one of them looking off toward a cluster of figures gathered further away by the water. Watteau was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1721, at 36, and he spent much of that short time painting afternoons that never seem to end.