Jean-Antoine Watteau

Jean-Antoine Watteau invented the fête galante and died at thirty-six, having changed the direction of French painting. Born in Valenciennes in 1684, a town that had been Flemish until six years before his birth, he was the son of a roof tiler and grew up closer to the Netherlandish tradition than to Paris. He went to Paris around 1702 with nothing, and worked for a time in a workshop mass-producing devotional pictures. He then assisted Claude Gillot, who painted commedia dell'arte subjects, and Claude Audran III, the decorator and curator of the Luxembourg Palace, where he studied Rubens's Marie de' Medici cycle at length. The colour and handling of the rest of his career come from that. He entered work for the Academy in 1712, and when he finally delivered his reception piece in 1717 — the Pilgrimage to Cythera — the Academy had no existing category for it and invented one, admitting him as a painter of fêtes galantes. The pictures show elegantly dressed figures in parkland, playing music, flirting and preparing to leave, in a light that is always late in the day. Nothing is happening and the mood is unmistakably valedictory; they are usually read as about transience rather than pleasure. He filled sketchbooks with drawings from life in red, black and white chalk, and assembled compositions from them. He worked for the collector Pierre Crozat and painted the shop sign for the dealer Gersaint in 1720, in eight mornings, as a favour. He was tubercular, restless and difficult, destroying work and moving lodgings constantly. He died in 1721.

• Lived: 1684 CE – 1721 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter