#theatre

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 story goes that this was a rush job over the New Year holiday, when the printer had nobody else free and needed something for the hoardings by the following week. The actress it advertises liked it enough to tie him to a contract for years afterwards, and people supposedly peeled the things off walls overnight to keep them.

This came out of a job rather than out of nowhere — according to Wikipedia the actress hired him to design costumes and sets for a huge open-air Joan of Arc she was staging, and the panel came along with that work.

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.