Celebrated for his dreamlike paintings of amorous aristocrats and melancholy actors, Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) also produced a number of captivating works with military subjects'paintings and drawings--early in his career. They were executed when France was engaged in the costly and ultimately disastrous War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), but they look past the turbulence of battle and the heroic deeds of generals and kings to depict the more prosaic aspects of war--marches, halts, encampments, and bivouacs. They focus on the quiet moments between the fighting, outside of military discipline, when soldiers could rest and daydream and smoke pipes and play cards. Although they owe a debt to seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish precedents, they put forward a new, thoroughly modern vision of war in which the soldier's inner life, his experience of war, is brought to the fore.
The inclusion of preparatory drawings after live models, alongside a group of major finished oils, highlights the relationship between drawing and painting in Watteau's work, and how he developed his ideas for the subject and composition of his paintings.
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