#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.

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.

Another painter reportedly turned this commission down — a bishop pushing the swing while a nobleman peeks up a lady's skirt being too much for him — so Fragonard took the job instead.

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.

Wikipedia says he painted this to get himself into the French academy, and they couldn't fit it into any category they already had, so they invented one — well-off people mucking about outdoors in silk. People still argue about whether this lot are setting off or coming home.

This was the last in a run of seven portraits the same painter made of her over the years. It hung at Versailles first, then apparently passed down to her brother.

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.