Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (The Embarkation for Cythera)
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) · 1717
Elegant couples gather on a wooded shore beside a golden boat crowded with cupids. Cythera is the island sacred to Venus, the birthplace of love, and the garlanded herm of the goddess on the right presides over the scene. Read the group at the base of the statue from right to left and it becomes a sequence rather than a crowd: a couple still seated and absorbed in conversation, then a woman being helped to her feet, then a pair walking away while the woman turns for a last look back at the place they are leaving. Whether the pilgrims are setting out for the island or reluctantly departing from it has been argued for three hundred years, and Watteau gives no answer.
Everything is dissolved in a warm, hazy light borrowed from Rubens and from the Venetians, whose work Watteau studied in Parisian collections. The paint is thin and quick, the foliage suggested rather than described, the silks flicked in with strokes of pink, blue and silvery grey that only resolve at a distance. Watteau worked from chalk drawings of individual figures made from life and assembled his compositions from them, which is why each pose is so precisely observed while the whole scene feels invented.
The canvas was submitted to the Académie royale in 1717 as Watteau's reception piece. The Académie had no existing category for it, so it coined one, fête galante, effectively creating a genre to accommodate a single artist. Watteau died of tuberculosis four years later at thirty-six. A second, richer version of the subject, painted shortly afterwards, hangs at Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, so the comparison is easy to make in reproduction.
Did You Know? The Académie could not classify the picture, so it invented the term fête galante for Watteau and admitted him under a category that had not existed the day before.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.