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The Embarkation for Cythera
Jean-Antoine Watteau · Rococo & Neoclassicism
- Artist
- Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721)
- Date
- 1717
- Dimensions
- 129 x 194 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Musée du Louvre, Paris, France
The Embarkation for Cythera was the painting Watteau submitted to the French Royal Academy in 1717. It shows elegant couples on a hillside, about to board a golden boat for Cythera, the mythical island of Venus, goddess of love.
A closer look
Reading from right to left, the couples move through the stages of courtship: a lady still listening to her suitor beside a statue of Venus, another being helped to her feet, a third glancing back with regret as she is led down to the shore. Cupids flutter above the boat. The landscape dissolves into a golden haze, and the mood is wistful rather than joyful, as if the pleasures of love were already fading. The Academy had no category for this kind of scene, so it invented one: the fête galante.
History of the painting
Watteau painted the picture as his reception piece for the Royal Academy of Painting, which had admitted him in 1712 and waited five years for the work. The academicians had no category for this new kind of scene, so they invented one, the fête galante, which became a genre of its own. The painting remained the Academy's property until the Revolution abolished the institution in 1793, when it passed to the Louvre. A second version, painted soon afterwards, was bought by Frederick the Great and is in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin.
More by Jean-Antoine Watteau
In this gallery
Famous works elsewhere
- The Shop Sign of Gersaint 1720
- Nymph and Satyr 1716