Around 1710 -1780 · Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard and theater of desire

Parks, swings, shepherds, music and mythology make up the Rococo gallant festival: a world of pleasure staged where color, movement and gaze organize the love game.

The gallant festival was born with Antoine Watteau at the beginning of the 18th century, when his elegant couples gathered in parks escaped the traditional categories of the Academy. The genre combines landscape, conversation, music, dance and desire without recounting a single action. At Watteau, pleasure remains melancholy and fragile. His successors shift this balance. Jean-Baptiste Pater multiplies the companies and variations of the outdoors; François Boucher brings pastoral care, mythology and decor together; Jean-Honoré Fragonard accelerates the touch and transforms the garden into a mechanism of the gaze. In L'Escarpolette, thrown shoe, pink dress, statue and hidden lover make up a scene where movement and desire are rigorously directed. Rococo is not limited to decorative carelessness, however. These images respond to the leisure activities of an elite, often use pastoral fiction to mask social relationships and make the female body the privileged object of the gaze. Reading them together allows us to understand their pictorial invention, their humor, their sensuality and the historical conditions of this elegance. The "Fêtes galantes rococo" selection notably compares Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera and Dance. His reading favors drawing.

The Rococo gallant festival transforms the garden into a scene: each tree hides a look, each fabric extends a gesture, each pleasure reveals its social setting.