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Elegant customers browse paintings in a Paris art shop while a worker packs away a portrait of Louis XIV. Watteau painted this shop sign for his dealer friend Gersaint in 1720, and it hung outside for only fifteen days.

The story behind the painting

Edme François Gersaint was a marchand-mercier, a dealer in art and luxury goods, with a cramped boutique, hardly more than a booth with a small back room, on the medieval Pont Notre-Dame in the heart of Paris. Watteau himself asked to paint him a sign, complaining of cold fingers that needed exercise. He probably painted it in the spring of 1720, when the shop's whole front was rebuilt; a 2007 study by Vogtherr and Wenders de Calisse suggests it first filled the round field above the entrance. The source dates it to 1720 to 1721 and calls it Watteau's last prominent work; he died some time after.

What to look for

The painting greatly enlarges Gersaint's tiny shop. On the left a worker packs a portrait of Louis XIV into a crate. In the centre a young man offers his hand to a woman in pink stepping over the threshold. On the right an elderly couple examine a painting of nudes, and a pretty shop assistant, possibly Gersaint's wife, shows a canvas to a group of well-dressed young people. The walls are covered with pictures: stern portraits on the left seem to look down in disapproval, and scenes of nudes fill the right. The canvas, now about 163 by 306 cm, is in two parts.

Meaning and intent

The pictures on the walls quietly comment on the visitors. Where the polite customers only exchange glances and gentle gestures, the art around them hints at hidden desire. The painting is often read as a picture of a change in aristocratic culture, the sense of relief under the more licentious Regent Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, from 1715 to 1723, after the death of Louis XIV and before Louis XV took the throne. Packing away Pierre Mignard's portrait of the late king suggests the end of the old regime. The historian Daniel Roche thought the sign advertised the artist more than the dealer.

Legacy

The sign was soon bought by Claude Glucq, then by Watteau's patron Jean de Jullienne. Between 1720 and 1732 an unknown painter added upper sections to turn the original arched shape into a rectangle, and it was split into two parts. An engraving of 1732, after a small version by Pater, attracted the attention of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who bought the painting in 1748 from the Dutch dealer Pieter Boetgens. It has stayed in Germany ever since and is displayed at Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, where it was first shown in 1748, by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation.