Stop and Look – Jean-Antoine Watteau: Les Plaisirs du Bal

Watteau invented a new genre in painting, the Fête Galante, of which he was the supreme master. He sometimes painted single figures and, rarely, a pure landscape, but this subject matter, with several figures, comprises much of his output. Beautiful people are depicted in gorgeous costumes enjoying their exquisitely leisured time, chatting and flirting. The setting is usually some imaginary nobleman’s park, with trees and fountains and perhaps a lake with a boat in which to set sail for some equally imaginary island.

Here, rather unexpectedly, the setting is a grand Mannerist loggia (inspired by the Palais du Luxembourg in Paris), with rusticated columns supporting ample arches giving onto a silvery-green distance screened by tall trees.  A fountain plays, semi-naked caryatids support urns, and the laurel-crowned bust of some ancient poet presides from its place within a huge scallop shell. In the centre of a large group of people – someone has counted them: there are 65, plus four dogs – a young couple is dancing. Their clothes glisten and shimmer as the uneven light of this liminal space catches the movement of the drapery.

These are not everyday outfits. Nor are they simply the dress of Louis XV’s extravagant court. They are specifically theatrical, and overtones of theatrical performance, particularly of the Commedia dell’Arte, colour the whole scene. Two men among the crowd to the left are dressed as Harlequin and Pierrot, characters who appear frequently in Watteau’s fantasies, and a black page-boy attends one of the seated ladies who are watching from the front row of a sizeable audience. Another black servant is looking down from a balustraded roof-top at the right. These figures draw our attention, very discreetly, to the artificiality of the whole scene.

Watteau was a master draughtsman, and made many preparatory drawings for this elaborate composition. He was inspired by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and – very much in evidence here – the Venetian Paul Veronese, who specialised in lavish scenes of banquet and festivity, often featuring figures leaning over high balustrades. Those painters put their imaginations and technical skills to work in the service of serious and important subjects, mythological or religious. Watteau was content simply to paint beauty for its own sake, and he did it ravishingly.

What makes the sweetness of his pictures so poignant is the sense he conveys that the beauty he conjures up is fleeting; a mere dream of summer and happiness that can never be experienced in reality. The fancy dress, the snatched flirtations, the boat-trips to a magic island in glimmering light, are the experiences of some idyllic party that could never take place in the ordinary every-day world.

Watteau spent his life in or near Paris, and made one journey abroad – to London in 1719-20, where he had some influence on a generation of Rococo artists, as he did in France. But he was a sick man, and consumption carried him off in 1721. His tender paintings tell us that he knew he was not long for this prosaic earth.