El acuerdo perfecto

Watteau painted these dreamy garden gatherings, called fetes galantes, and he all but invented the type. This one comes from around 1719, in the relaxed years just after the death of Louis XIV, when the stiff grandeur of Versailles gave way to smaller, more private pleasures. A young woman holds the music while an older man plays a flute, other figures drift and make music under the trees, and a stone bust of Pan, the old god of the countryside, looks on from the upper corner. Watteau was gravely ill with tuberculosis even as he painted such light-hearted scenes, and he died in 1721, only about 36.