Le Dénicheur de moineaux

This little pastoral is a survivor, cut out of something larger. When Watteau made it around 1712 he was mostly a painter of decorative panels, and this couple once sat inside a painted frame of scrolling arabesques, the light ornamental fashion of the moment. Later owners trimmed all of that away and kept only the scene. A young man has been up a tree and brought down a sparrow's nest to show the girl leaning on his knee, their dog waiting beside them. Robbing a bird's nest was a stock image for courtship in those years, read at a glance without any explaining. Within a few years Watteau would leave the ornament behind and invent the outdoor flirtations he is remembered for, and he had little time to do it, dead of tuberculosis by 1721 at 36.