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(Jean) Antoine Watteau Biography

(1684 - 1721)

Related Works

1714–15 Le Bal Champêtre (Dulwich College Picture Gallery, London)
1716–17 Assemblée dans un parc (Louvre, Paris)
1716–17 Les Deux Cousines (Hubert de Ganay Collection, Paris)

1716–18 Gilles and His Family (Wallace Collection, London)
1717 Embarkation for the Island of Cythera (Louvre, Paris)
1717–18 The Music Party (Wallace Collection, London)
1718–19 Mezzetin (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)
1720 Italian Comedians (National Gallery, Washington, DC)
1721 Halt in the Chase (Wallace Collection, London)
1721 L'Enseigne de Gersaint (Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)

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(born Oct. 10, 1684, Valenciennes, France—died July 18, 1721, Nogent-sur-Marne) French painter. Son of a roof tiler in Valenciennes, he was apprenticed to a local artist. At 18 he moved to Paris, where he worked for a series of painters; one of them was a theatrical scenery painter, and much of Watteau's work consequently embraced the artifice of the theatre, particularly the commedia dell'arte and the ballet. His works typified the lyrically charming and graceful Rococo style. The greatest, his Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, depicts pilgrims setting out for (or departing from) the mythic island of love and was his presentation piece when he was inducted into the academy in 1717. The academicians, unable to fit him into any of the recognized categories, welcomed him as a painter of fêtes galantes (“elegant festivities”), an important new genre to which countless later Rococo pictures belong.