The Rococo is often caricatured as the “decadent art of the aristocratic elite,” and while there’s some truth to that idea, this era of painting can also be recognized for achieving something far more interesting than simply portraying rich folk in their satin and silk. Instead of pulling a Diderot and dismissing the extravagance of this era, we can recognize what was achieved: a revived focus on the contemporary. Rather than commissioning monumental works glorifying the monarchy and its trappings, the next wealthiest cadre of social influencers—aristocrats, financiers, and the emerging bourgeoisie—wanted something that the somber Baroque would not provide. In a word: pleasure. As they commissioned paintings for their newly built private salons and townhouses in the lavish interiors of the new Baroque-lite, they wanted paintings that equally reflected their personal tastes rather than public propaganda. In other words, this wasn’t just a stylistic change; it represented a fundamental re-imagining of the kinds of stories art might tell.
Enter Watteau
Jean-Antoine Watteau was born in 1684, in the northern border town of Valenciennes, to a reasonably well-off family—though not one with any artistic leanings, and therefore his earliest training remains a bit obscure. In 1702, at age 18, he moved to Paris where he began to sell small sketches and copies of popular genre paintings. As it turns out, he was at the right place at the right time. He came into contact with Claude Gillot, who furthered Watteau’s painting technique, introduced him to theatrical subjects and commedia dell’arte characters, and had a real artistic influence on his development. It was during this time he also met Claude Audran III, a popular interior designer and decorator, for whom he later worked and furthered his career.
Watteau’s reputation soon opened doors — including into the circle of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, which allowed him to compete for the Prix de Rome as a history painter in 1709. He placed second, behind the now-forgotten Antoine Grison, for his now-lost rendition of Abigail Who Brings Food to David. Not bad, but not quite the golden ticket — and as it turned out, he wouldn’t need one. A few years later, Charles de La Fosse, the man behind the sweeping murals at Versailles, went to bat for Watteau’s admission into the academy in 1712. The only requirement? A single reception piece, the requirement of all academicians. The problem? Watteau kept putting it off, not for weeks or months but for years.
To be clear, the delay wasn’t entirely Watteau’s fault. He’d been approved to submit the work back in 1712, but private commissions kept rolling in as his reputation grew. By the time he finally delivered the painting in 1717, he’d created something that would define an entire movement—even if that wasn’t exactly his intention. The painting, The Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, now hangs in the Louvre, where a placard notes it as one of his masterpieces. What it doesn’t quite capture is how radical this painting was for its time.
Watteau’s Pilgrimage offers a playful mashup of past and present, bringing together the lofty themes of ancient myth with the decadence of the contemporary aristocracy. At left, there’s a boat—a sort of grandiose gondola—docked at the shore, steered by a pair of scantily clad oarsmen with a gaggle of putti—those chubby winged babies symbolizing love—flying overhead. The lavishly dressed couples meander from the shoreline deeper into the lush vegetation of the island. The farther inland they go, the more intimate the relationships seem to become. In addition to their refined attire, the men carry tall walking staffs and wear short capes around their shoulders, the traditional garb of pilgrims. At the far right sits a couple with a small child curiously sitting on a quiver full of arrows, tugging on the woman’s dress. They’re positioned next to a partially broken ancient statue of a female nude, draped with roses, with another quiver of arrows wrapped around its base. For Watteau’s audience, the message was clear: the statue is Venus, making the child a thinly veiled allusion to Cupid. That Arcadian island of Cythera also happens to be her mythological hometown.
Watteau’s nod to “the pilgrim” is the essential clue to this painting. It’s an element easily overlooked today; not many contemporary viewers recognize the iconography of a religious pilgrimage in those staffs and capes once worn by those en route to a sacred destination. Watteau took the visual language of religious devotion and applied it to an entirely different type of journey, a profane rather than sacred type of love. These aren’t figures from medieval Europe or ancient Greece, but the powdered-wig aristocracy of the early 18th century, painted in Watteau’s feathery brushwork.
The pilgrimage theme would have resonated with Watteau’s contemporaries, as Watteau revitalized a past trend rather than inventing one anew. The reframing of the pilgrimage may have been inspired by the 1705 opéra-ballet La Vénitienne (The Venetian Woman), which featured a voyage to Cythera alongside commedia dell’arte characters—the two subjects Watteau explored throughout his career. Venetian culture was having a moment during the Regency period. After the death of Louis XIV and his rigid, formal court, French aristocrats were obsessed with all things Venetian: the carnival culture, the theatrical spectacle, the sensuality, and especially that gorgeous Venetian use of color and light. The gondola in Watteau’s painting isn’t just decorative—it’s a nod to this fashionable infatuation with La Serenissima.* The pilgrimage isn’t to a towering Gothic cathedral. It’s to love itself, to pleasure, to the kind of intimate romantic encounters that happen in garden grottos and private salons.
Although greatly popular, the theme of the painting presented a bit of a conundrum for the salon committee. It referenced elements of classical mythology and was of a relatively large scale, but was not set in the distant past like traditional history painting demanded. The Venus portrayed was not an actual goddess from a well-known myth but a timeworn statue. Nor was it purely genre painting offering morality dressed in the simple narratives of everyday life. Instead, it existed in a kind of liminal space not yet defined, but one that soon would be.
Inventing the Fête Galante
In many ways, The Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera sets the stage for what the Rococo would become. The soft pastels—those pale blues, rose pinks, golden ambers—define the movement’s color palette. The feathery brushwork, visible in the shimmering fabrics and atmospheric landscape, updates the lavish technique of Rubens with a lighter, more delicate twist. The subject matter elevated pleasure and sensuality over moral instruction, and this was just the beginning…just wait until we meet Boucher and Fragonard!
The Academy didn’t quite know what to do with this painting. It didn’t fit into any established category in the academic hierarchy. History painting portrayed grand historical or mythological scenes. Genre painting showed everyday life with moral lessons. But this was something new. When Watteau finally submitted the painting in 1717, the Academy invented a new classification just for him: “fêtes galantes“—elegant outdoor entertainments where aristocrats engage in courtship and pleasure. Watteau became the first and defining painter of this new genre, one that would be imitated but never quite matched.
But for all its frivolity, the Rococo marked a new kind of patron: paintings for salon culture reflecting the wit, wealth, and sensuality of the aristocracy’s return to Paris during the Regency. It was a style born of intimate gatherings and private enjoyments, for an aristocracy wanting to see idealized versions of themselves engaged in sophisticated—and not so sophisticated—leisure. Watteau wasn’t inventing from scratch. Venetian Renaissance painters—Giorgione and Titian—had created similar fête champêtre scenes two centuries earlier. Watteau would have studied Titian’s Pastoral Concert in the royal collection, where his colleague Audran worked as curator. But where the Venetians mixed contemporary figures with allegorical nudes and classical themes, Watteau made his scenes entirely contemporary, entirely French, entirely about the pleasures of his own moment.
As One Journey Ends
With The Pilgrimage, Watteau established a framework where contemporary life could be rendered through mythology without becoming pure allegory or documentation. The aristocracy could see themselves as participants in eternal romance, their garden parties elevated to classical myth. The Academy’s invention of the “fête galante” category acknowledged something they probably didn’t want to admit: art didn’t have to glorify the state or instruct the faithful. It could simply capture pleasure, beauty, intimacy—the things people actually wanted on their walls.
The Rococo grew increasingly decadent over ensuing decades, but The Pilgrimage offers a reminder that these embellished scenes were sugar-coated fictions rather than actual memories. The aristocracy wanted reflections of their own world—their refined sensibilities and sophisticated pleasures rendered as beautifully as any myth. Watteau, dying of tuberculosis at 37, set the course others would follow.
*La Serenissima: “The Most Serene,” the poetic nickname for the Republic of Venice.