Os Prazeres do Baile

Watteau finished this around 1717, at the height of his short career, and it is often called the finest of the dreamy garden parties he invented. Everything in it is staged. The grand villa with its stone caryatids never existed. Watteau built it on the canvas out of buildings he had studied in paintings by Veronese and Rubens, then filled the terrace with elegant couples and set one pair dancing a slow minuet under the arch. The figures came from chalk drawings he had made of real people around Paris. Nearly a century later the picture crossed to England, and the landscape painter John Constable, about as different from Watteau as a painter could be, stood in front of it and said it looked as if it had been painted in honey, so mellow, so tender, so soft and so delicious.