L'Amant inquiet

Watteau made this small panel around 1715, just as the long, stiff reign of Louis XIV was ending and French painting was loosening into something lighter and more intimate. It is barely the size of a sheet of paper, a single young woman in silky pastoral dress seated in a park. Watteau more or less invented this kind of scene, the fête galante, elegant people idling in gardens with a faint air of longing over everything. The woman holds a cluster of cut roses, which viewers then would have read as a sign of love already spent, and her expression gives the picture its title of the anxious, or worried, lover. Watteau was ill through much of these years and would be dead by 1721, not yet 37.