失足

Louis XIV died in 1715, and with the old king gone the stiff grandeur of Versailles gave way to something lighter and more private under the Regency that followed. Watteau caught that mood better than anyone, painting small scenes of elegant people flirting in parks. This is one of his most compact. A man in the grass presses himself on a seated woman, and she twists away, one hand fending him off, the whole drama of an unwelcome advance told in two bodies. Watteau leaned on earlier masters for it, especially Rubens, whose crowded village revels he had studied in Paris. He was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him in 1721, at 36.