Antoine Watteau (Valenciennes 1684-1721 Nogent-sur-Marne)

The girl on the left is a study for a figure in L'Amour paisible, painted in 1719 for Dr Richard Mead in London. The picture is now lost but is known through an engraving by Bernard Baron (Watteau, exhib. cat., Washington and elsewhere, 1984-5, under no. P66, fig. 1).
The seated figure was used by Watteau in two pictures, Les Champs Elysées and Divertissements champêtres (M. Roland-Michel, Watteau. An artist of the eighteenth Century, London, 1984, pp. 124 and 205). In both she is seated on the ground and carries flowers in her basket.
Two drawings in the British Museum also related to figures in Les Champs Elysées and Divertissements champêtres seem to represent the same woman as in the present work (Rosenberg and Prat, op. cit., nos. 528 and 587). The three drawings share the same technique of red chalk and graphite. The latter was often used by Watteau in the later part of his career where it became 'an integral part of the image, contributing new effects of colour, texture, pattern and tone' (M. Morgan Grasselli, op. cit., p. 122).