The Country Dance

Under dark trees, villagers make music while a couple dances and a toddler copies the lady's steps. The Country Dance is thought to be Watteau's earliest known painting, and already it sounds like him.

The story behind the painting

The Country Dance was probably painted roughly between 1706 and 1710, shortly after Watteau moved from Valenciennes to Paris; Wikidata gives 1706. It is described as his earliest known painting, yet he had already developed his own style. He took the merry rustic scenes loved by Flemish painters before him, such as Pieter Bruegel and Peter Paul Rubens, and gave them a new grace, nobility and style. Though the subject was a standard northern European one, he drew heavily on Venetian landscapes, especially for the atmosphere.

What to look for

The canvas is about 49.5 by 60 cm. Amid the trees, a group of villagers plays music while a couple dances, and a small child copies the lady's movements, to everyone's amusement. Look at the musicians: they glance coyly out at us, like actors who know they are being watched, an interaction that became one of Watteau's hallmarks. The dark forest behind makes the peasants' bright clothes stand out sharply, a picture of visual extremes.

Meaning and intent

Music here does not hint at debauchery, as it often did at the time, but at social harmony and order. The peasants are rather courtly, and the formal dress of the dancers in a rustic setting brings together the fete galante and a court celebration moved into a charming corner of the countryside. In effect the painting is an early declaration in favour of the Rococo, the style with which Watteau would become so closely linked.

Legacy

The Country Dance belongs to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which received it in 1974 as a gift from Mrs. Herman C. Krannert. It hangs in the Charles O. McGaughey Gallery under accession number 74.98. For visitors today it offers a rare chance to see where Watteau began: a young painter newly arrived in Paris, already quietly turning a village dance into something graceful, theatrical and full of quiet joy.