#rococo

Mezzetino was a stock character in the old Italian travelling comedies — a servant type, always in love with someone who isn't having it. From what I can find, this sat in the collection of a friend who had prints made of everything, and a few decades later it was bought up for the Empress of Russia's palace.

The oval is the clue: pictures shaped like this were usually made to fit a panel over a door or a fireplace, ordered as part of the decorating rather than hung on a nail. From what I've read this one came with a companion piece the same size.

From what I can find, this was part of a set standing in for the four seasons — the lion's a nod to Leo, marking high summer.

This one, from what I can find, was painted as a companion to another Watteau scene called The Surprise — the two were meant to hang as a pair.

Apparently the enormous trees that turn up over and over in his landscapes get traced back to a stint in Italy filling sketchbooks with old villa gardens, or so I've read. Big decorative pictures like this were often ordered to fill a particular wall in somebody's house — furniture, more or less, for people who could afford painted furniture.

Shepherds and shepherdesses were a craze in France at the time — pastoral plays and operas everywhere, and painters selling the same daydream for the wall. Nobody buying one expected real farm work to look like this. I couldn't find who ordered this particular one.

The setup is Venus taking the arrows off Cupid so he can't fire them at anyone. Painted, apparently, for the king's mistress, who bought a lot of pictures like this — mythology was the standard licence for a nude in a respectable room.

By the time this was made, critics had started turning on this sort of thing — Diderot went after it in print, supposedly, for being pretty and false. Buyers carried on wanting it regardless.

Nobody knows who she was, from what I can find. She's usually lumped in with a run of quick 'fantasy figures' he knocked out — people in dress-up rather than portraits of anyone in particular. Scans of the canvas supposedly show a different figure underneath, facing straight out, before he painted over it.

From what I can find, nobody's totally sure whether this shows an actual performance or Watteau's own daydream of one — his theater scenes tend to blur the two.