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The Pilgrimage to Cythera is the painting with which Watteau was admitted to the Royal Academy in 1717, and it invented a genre: the fete galante, a scene of aristocratic pleasure in a park, poised between comedy and melancholy. A group of elegantly dressed couples is preparing to leave for Cythera, the island of Venus, or perhaps returning from it - the painting deliberately leaves the direction unclear. A gilded barge waits at the right, cupids hover above, and the light is the soft, hazy gold of late afternoon.
Watteau’s touch is light and rapid, and the paint is applied in small, flickering strokes that give the foliage and the silk a shimmering quality. The figures are arranged in a descending diagonal from the statue of Venus on the left to the boat on the right, so that the eye travels through the composition as if following a procession. The mood is not simply festive: several of the figures look hesitant, and the statue is garlanded as if for a farewell.
The painting was one of the most admired works of the eighteenth century and was copied, engraved and imitated across Europe. It entered the Louvre in 1793 and is the museum’s central work of the Rococo.
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) was born in Valenciennes, then part of the Spanish Netherlands, and moved to Paris as a young man. He worked as a copyist and decorator before developing the fete galante, and he was influenced by the theatre, by Rubens and by the Venetian painters he studied in the Luxembourg Palace. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-six, leaving a small body of work that reshaped French painting.
The fete galante was a response to the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the relaxation of court culture under the Regent. Watteau’s paintings of parks, music and courtship offered an alternative to the grand mythological and historical subjects demanded by the Academy, and his admission as a "painter of fetes galantes" created a new category in the Academy’s hierarchy.
Sully Wing · Level 2 · French Paintings, 18th Century
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
Other pieces from the same artist, period or type of object.
