L'Indifférent

A young man in pale blue satin seems caught mid dance step, one arm out, a red cape over the other. Watteau painted him on a panel barely larger than a page. In 1939 he vanished from the Louvre, and came back two months later.

The story behind the painting

L'Indifférent is a small oil on oak panel by Antoine Watteau. French Wikipedia dates it 1717, while Wikidata gives only the 1710s. It entered the Louvre in 1869 with the collection of Louis La Caze. The panel is tiny: about 26 by 20 cm and 3 mm thick according to Wikipedia, 25.5 by 19 cm according to Wikidata. Its back is reinforced with a cradle of five horizontal and three vertical bars, which keeps the thin oak flat.

What to look for

The young man wears a coat of very pale blue satin, pink stockings and pinkish yellow shoes. Over his right arm hangs a red cape lined with blue, and he wears a blue hat with a pink bow, with a matching bow on his left shoulder. Behind him, trees rise toward the left and a sunset sky opens to the right. The poet Paul Claudel, writing in 1946, saw him poised between flight and walking, half fawn and half bird, waiting for the right moment, one arm stretched out as if counting the beat.

Meaning and intent

The title remains a mystery. It may point to a theme hovering between quietism and libertinism: a charmer without passion who keeps control of himself and uses the artifices of the human comedy, here the shimmering clothes and the dance step, to stay free. This ambiguous idea of gallant indifference was in the air in the age of Louis XV. Around 1732, fifteen years after the painting, the dancer Marie Sallé and the singer Marie Pélissier founded an Order of the Indifferent, whose members swore to escape the power of romantic passion.

Legacy

On Sunday 12 June 1939, around 3.50 pm, the painting was stolen from the Louvre. It was the first theft from the museum since the Mona Lisa, 28 years before. On 14 August a man named Serge Bogousslavsky, known as Bog, brought it back, saying he had taken it to restore it, and he made sure journalists were there. He was sentenced on appeal to four years in prison. The theft even appears in the 1971 novel Fantômette et la Maison hantée, where visitors come to stare at the empty spot on the wall.