Antoine Watteau

Antoine Watteau is a French Rococo painter, creator of fêtes galantes and precursor of romanticism whose melancholic and refined work captures the ephemeral grace of the French aristocracy at the twilight of Louis XIV's reign. Trained in the Flemish tradition and influenced by Rubens, he develops a style characterized by pearly colors, vibrant touch and an atmosphere of poetic nostalgia that transforms scenes of aristocratic entertainment into meditations on the fugacity of pleasure. His fêtes galantes, genre he invents and which earns him admission to the Academy, represent elegant couples in enchanted parks, mixing reality and theater in an ambiguity that prefigures romanticism. His Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, masterpiece of melancholic grace, creates a modern mythology of love and desire that influences all French painting of the 18th century. Died young of tuberculosis, he leaves a work imbued with fragility and nostalgia that announces Fragonard, Boucher and preromantic sensibility.