Synopsis
Antoine Watteau painted his "fetes galantes" during a period in which the art of polite conversation flourished in France. In this study, Mary Vidal shows that conversation was central to Watteau's images of sociability, providing the framework for figural and formal relationships even in his military, mythological, theatrical and religious works. Vidal argues that Watteau's painted conversations were not mere literal descriptions of social behaviour but repesented conversation as part of an aesthetic, linguistic and ethical system, as an art of living. Vidal shows that Watteau's focus on cnverstion was related to developments in the 17th- and 18th-century France: the rise and elaboration of an art of conversation, the connection between polite discourse and the redefinition of the nobility, the flourishng of women's salons in Paris and the development of the literary genre of the written conversation. Watteau recognised speech as the central sign system in French society and he identified the characteristics of fine conversation in his new manner of painting.
Through this analogy, he presented the artistic process itself as the main concern of the elite artist, in contrast to the scholarly, text-dependent image of the Academy. In choosing conversation as his subject, Watteau associated his art with polite society. In his conversational artmaking, Watteau set up dialogic relationships between spoken words and images, art and society, viewer and painting. Often regarded as merely erotic and decorative, this books shows his painted conversations to be also works of substance, ideas and morals.
