LOUVRE MUSEUM, Pierrot Gilles Watteau Richelieu Wing Hall 35

The masterpiece by Antoine Watteau that you're admiring, known as Pierrot or Gilles, symbolizes the new French artistic and cultural season that occurred between the end of Louis XIV's lengthy absolute monarchy and the accession of Louis XV to the throne, with the expression of Madame de Pompadour's subtly erotic taste.

These were the disenchanted, elegant years of the Regency, between 1715 and 1723.  Although it is an apparently “light” theme there’s a sense of nostalgia, a sadness that filters through even the seemingly lighthearted scenes.

Watteau was a great lover of theater and knew the rules of masquerade and fiction, and the relationships that gestures, expressions and emotions share. The Commedia dell'Arte world of masks became the backdrop for anxieties and ambiguities, the sense of precariousness that the Louis XIV era had been trying to stamp out with all its pomp and magnificence....