Antoine Watteau

Watteau came to Paris from Valenciennes, worked with the theatre painter Claude Gillot and the decorator Claude Audran, and studied Rubens’s Medici cycle at the Luxembourg Palace. In 1717 the Academy received him with a new category, the fête galante, for his Pilgrimage to Cythera: elegant figures in parkland, often in theatre costume, touched with melancholy. His chalk drawings, frequently in red, black and white, are among the finest of the century. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-six.

Written by Ochre Editions.