“Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France”

One of the leading painters of 18th-century French Rococo, Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) specialized in lush imaginary landscapes populated by figures in aristocratic dress or theatrical costumes. His enigmatic compositions were so unusual that the Académie des Beaux-Arts invented a new category for them: Fêtes galantes, a kind of cross between pastoral idylls and mythological allegories. The otherworldliness of those paintings stand in sharp contrast to his images of soldiers during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). While there’s no bloodshed or even signs of evident conflict, they are far more realistic in style than Watteau's other works, especially in the ways they depict the everyday lives of common soldiers. This show brings together four of Watteau’s seven surviving military paintings as well as twelve red chalk studies of the same subject.