El embarco para Citera

Louis XIV had died in 1715, and after decades of a stiff and pious court France exhaled into pleasure. Watteau caught that mood exactly. He owed the Royal Academy a reception piece and kept putting it off for years until they finally forced his hand. What he delivered in 1717 showed elegant couples on a wooded shore, drifting toward a boat that will carry them to Cythera, the island sacred to Venus and to love. Cupids swirl overhead and a garlanded statue of Venus presides at the right. The Academy had no category for a picture like this, so it invented one for him, the fete galante, the courtship party out of doors. Watch the line of figures, the pair still seated and reluctant to leave, then the couples already rising, then those wandering down to the water, so the whole painting reads as one slow movement toward the boat.