Embarkation for Cythera

Artwork: Embarkation for Cythera

Artist: Jean-Antoine Watteau, French painter (Born: 10 October 1684-Died: 18 July 1721)

Created: 1717

Period: Rocco

Subject: Fête galante

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 129-194 cm

Current location: Louvre Museum, Paris, France

Source photography, Wikipedia

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“Peinture, to whom he presented as morceau de réception in 1717 the so-called Embarkation for Cythera which really shows pilgrim lovers leaving Cythera after having paid their vows at the island shrine of Venus.

A chain of paired-off lovers links the rose-hung term to the waiting boat, but the woman turns back sadly. Time is inexorable. The boat waits; and the lovers’ pilgrimage is over.

The handling of the paint is like that of Rubens turned miniaturist, with its nervously silken touch on the clothes, the foliage, the Claude-like mists which swirl about the distant sea and peaks. Elegant, artificial and half sad, the picture is yet as it were the rosiest possible view of eighteenth-century society.”(ML)

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