WATTEAU, Jean-Antoine
(b. 1684, Valenciennes, d. 1721, Nogent-sur-Marne)

The Shepherds

1717-19
Oil on canvas, 56 x 81 cm
Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin

The painting shows rich people playing at peasantry, a practice that had been popular in France since at least the days of the early fifteenth-century Burgundian ducal court at Germolles. Watteau's amorous ladies and gentlemen assume the purportedly readier eroticism of rustic life as they dance, push, or grab one another while a bagpiper provides the "food of love."




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