Watteau

Paris dressed, posed, picnicked, and conversed à la Watteau—yet the painter who gave it this graceful dream was restless, distrustful, and painfully thin. In one self-portrait, he called himself “Watteau Laughing.”

In France at the turn of the eighteenth century, Antoine Watteau leaves his home in Valenciennes for Paris, determined to make a life in art. C. Lewis Hind’s early-twentieth-century biography follows him from a tiler’s son who draws everything in sight to a painter whose scenes of elegance and pleasure seem touched by longing. In Paris, Watteau earns three livres a week painting devotional images by the dozen, but spends his spare moments studying the life around him. How did this hungry, unsettled young man make gaiety glow—and what shadow followed it?

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