The two cousins

By a lake in a park, a young man offers roses to a woman who tucks one into her bodice. Beside them another woman stands with her back to us, face hidden. Watteau's The Two Cousins is a small painting about love shared and love refused.

The story behind the painting

Les Deux Cousines is an oil on canvas painted by Antoine Watteau around 1716, the year before he entered the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture. It belongs to the fete galante, scenes of men and women at aristocratic leisure, such as music, dancing and conversation, set in landscapes or architecture beyond the real; the Academy created that category specifically for Watteau in 1717. Watteau explored it throughout his career, in large compositions and in small formats like this one, always taking great care over rich clothing.

What to look for

The canvas is small, about 30.5 by 36 cm, set in a park with statues near a sheet of water. The three main figures fill half of the picture. In the centre a woman stands with her back to us, in a wide pinkish beige dress, her hair in a high bun that shows the nape of her neck. Beside her a man offers roses to his companion, who slips one between her breasts. In the background, look for two ghostly figures lying on the grass between the sculptures.

Meaning and intent

The gift of roses is a symbol of shared love. The young couple talk, look at each other and show their mutual interest, while the woman in the centre is isolated, face hidden, as if cut off from the world. For Pierre Rosenberg the couple embodies joy and love returned, while she stands for sadness and love refused. Because her face is hidden, we cannot know what she truly feels. The work may draw on the Dancourt brothers' successful play Les Trois Cousines of 1700, yet nothing refers to it explicitly, and some specialists doubt Watteau meant to tell a story at all.

Legacy

Three preparatory drawings are known, in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the British Museum in London and an English private collection; they show how carefully Watteau worked out his figures' clothes. He often reused such drawings: the seated woman on the right also appears in two paintings in the Wallace Collection in London. Around 1729 Bernard Baron, a French engraver working in London, engraved the picture, and his print is the first place the title Les Deux Cousines appears. The painting is now in the Department of Paintings of the Louvre.