Three centuries ago, on July 18, 1721, Jean-Antoine Watteau died of complications from persistent tuberculosis.

He wasn't even thirty-seven years old.

His short, sad life began in northern France, where he was born in 1684, the son of a roofer.

Not much is known about his training, and works by hand can only be identified after 1702.

In that year the painter went to Paris, where, with short interruptions, he sublet lived with various acquaintances until his death.

It is strange that Watteau liked to paint soldiers who moved from one battlefield to the next during the wars that Louis XIV waged towards the end of his reign, but also to actresses and actors from the Comédie-Française and the Italian Commedia dell'Arte.

Actors and soldiers alike in that they both obey strict rules and should continually succeed in new terrain.

A comparison of these two groups also gives a metaphor for life in the absolutist monarchy.

The vast majority of obedient recipients of orders are confronted by a small elite of privileged people who stage their lives as an ongoing play.

As if they were trapped in an imaginary cage

Watteau's genius consisted in portraying the theatrical world of the rulers without becoming theatrical itself. This happened in pictures for which a whole new category was invented when he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Art, the so-called fêtes galantes. A typical example of this genre can be seen in the Louvre under the title “Assemblée dans un parc”.

In the foreground we are encouraged by a gentleman and a lady in elegant clothes, who are depicted as back figures, to follow them into the picture space. This point is particularly suitable for this, because here our view goes over a pond and the other bank through a gap between the trees to the horizon and to a piece of sky that has a similar outline to the woman in the foreground. This creates a vertical, light-filled column that divides the picture into a square part on the right and a narrow rectangle on the left.

While only a dying tree trunk can be seen on the left, the painter on the right gathers a total of nine people in a narrow room delimited by dense foliage.

A girl is standing by the pond, again as a back figure, two other girls are lying next to a man in the grass, two women are fiddling with their love letters, a lady flirtatiously defends herself against the intrusiveness of a gentleman, and on the far right a man is playing his flute.

The heads of four of these people form a horizontal line, as if they were all trapped in an imaginary cage.

High trees rise above them, with neither trunks nor branches and twigs clearly visible.

They are reminiscent of balls of cotton candy or similar substances that could collapse at any time without an internal structure.

Always something ghostly and unreal

Under the darkness of the trees, people's festive robes are lit by a harsh, flickering light that could come from torches or lightning bolts. And if you then look for the source of this light, the result is as clear as it is astonishing: It falls from the outside - i.e. from us - into the picture. Most of the time, you only see the bright reflections of the clothes, but not the textile material. As a result, the people depicted lose their material stability, they consist, like soap bubbles, only of a shimmering outer skin.

This can be seen as a symptom of the fact that the real person in the world of gallant idleness is irrelevant anyway. What counts is her role alone, and this role is determined by a highly differentiated theatricality. The days of the dreamy ladies and their melancholy lovers passed, as Niklas Luhmann noted, with “periodic sighs and knees”. All social interaction was based on a repertoire of poses and pantomime acts that today seem extremely affected, ornamental and artificial.

Watteau probably saw it that way too. That is why his figures always have something ghostly and unreal about them, as if there were no flesh and no blood under the glittering robes and the made-up faces. His application of paint is mostly thin and sketchy, and all things are formed from transparent brushstrokes, behind which one suspects nothing. It's not just because he was a high-speed painter. Apparently he deliberately designed his figures as fragile appearances, without any inner substance, only considering external effects. Against such a glossing over of appearances, the rising bourgeoisie propagated other ideals: the righteousness, sanity and firmness of character of people who do not pretend to be. But there isn't much left of that today.In the so-called social media, on TikTok and Instagram, the broad masses are now allowed to practice the gallant game with the seductive appearance, which Watteau was able to reproduce so well in his time, precisely because he did not take part in it himself.