폴란드 여인

A woman in a fur-trimmed cap and wrap looks out with a faint smile, dressed in what 18th-century Paris thought of as Polish or eastern fashion, the kind of exotic costume that delighted French taste in the Regence years after Louis XIV died in 1715. The picture has long gone under the name of Antoine Watteau, the painter who invented the dreamy garden-party scenes of that moment. Whether his own hand made it is an old argument. Scholars have dated it anywhere from about 1710 to the 1730s, and some doubt it is by Watteau at all. What is certain is the design behind it: it matches a lost Watteau drawing that survives because Francois Boucher etched it for a printed collection in 1726. The little panel is now in the National Museum in Warsaw.