El placer pastoral

Watteau more or less invented the fete galante, elegant people idling in parkland, and this small panel is one of its quieter examples. French aristocrats have dressed up as shepherds to dance and flirt, but Watteau slips in a couple of real peasants in plainer clothes, so you can tell the game from the thing it imitates. He painted it around 1714, in his late twenties and already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1721. The scholar Pierre Rosenberg has argued this is really an oil study for a larger, more finished Shepherds now in Berlin. It later belonged to the great print collector Pierre-Jean Mariette.