New Volume Presents a Revealing Look at Jean Antoine Watteau’s La Surprise
Considered lost for nearly two centuries, this painting has never before been the subject of a dedicated publication
Watteau at Work
*La Surprise*Authors
Emily A. Beeny, Davide Gasparotto, and Richard Rand
Body Content
Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was a masterful painter and draftsman, arguably the greatest of the French Rococo era.
He is renowned for inventing the fête galante, a genre of painting depicting bucolic open-air gatherings filled with charming scenes of gallantry, music, dance, strolling lovers, and actors from the Italian commedia dell’arte. These evocative works do not so much tell a story as they set a mood of playful, wistful, nostalgic reverie. La Surprise is among the best preserved of these paintings. Esteemed by collectors in Watteau’s day as a work that showed the artist at the height of his career, La Surprise vanished from public view in 1848, not to reemerge for more than a century and a half in 2017, when it was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Watteau at Work: La Surprise (J. Paul Getty Museum, $24.95) marks the three hundredth anniversary of Watteau’s death. This publication, which situates the painting within the context of the artist’s life, his artistic sources, and his working methods, is the first dedicated solely to La Surprise. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from November 23, 2021, to February 20, 2022.