Additional texteDescription: In Antoine Watteau’s painting The Love Lesson, a group of young people are sitting by a marble statue of a huddled nymph in a parkland setting. They are being entertained by a man with a Spanish guitar. One of the girls is breaking off roses and appears to strew petals over the group. The girl in the yellow dress has a notebook on her knee.
The Love Lesson is an example of a fête galante, a genre painting depicting a park landscape of sultry light and leafy greenery with people socialising together, a typical theme for the artist.
X-ray images show that Watteau painted The Love Lesson on a coach door bearing a coat of arms with two unicorns and the crown of a marquis.
Nationalmuseum acquired the work in 1953 by means of fundraising, donations from the Friends of Nationalmuseum and money from the museum’s funds.
Exhibition text: In an idyllic park landscape, a party is seated below a sculpture of a love nymph. A pair of lovers pore over a book of music, while the guitarist seems to be waiting to start playing. The woman in blue seated slightly apart from the others has almost the same pose as the nymph. Her lap is filled with roses and she has a dreamy look in her eyes. Poetic park scenes were typical of Watteau.
Catalogue text: Seated before the man with a guitar is an elegant party in a leafy parkland. Silk dresses in blue, green and yellow contrast with the dark vegetation. Here and there are the heads of roses – the flower of love – picked by the woman by the rose bush. Despite his short life, Watteau was to be one of the most influential French artists of the 18th century. The Love Lesson is typical of the genre he created – the fête galante – with its mixture of melancholy moods and amorous undertones.
