February Art: dream
Despite the academic-sounding title and the central portico making this an identifiable setting (La Perspective (c.1715) seems to be set in the collector Pierre Crozat’s maison de plaisance outside Paris) this picture comes upon the viewer like some half-remembered dream. Before his early death Jean-Antoine Watteau became known for what a baffled academician called ‘festes (fêtes) galantes’, parties of people in contemporary dress distributed in outdoor settings with no obvious mythological referent. Paintings like this have drawn comparisons with theatre, and such groupings of figures, guitarists alongside admiring women, gesturing would-be lovers, are familiar from Watteau’s sketches and other works, as well as engraved by others.
But what are they all doing here? This play has no script, and its atmosphere of shimmering sensuality seems to demand privacy rather an audience. A minute or two more and, like the ladies who wander towards the crevice incised between looming trees, you feel that they’d all have found a convenient nook or melted away into the foliage – and the scene left empty.
thebicyclops 