A Man Leaning against a Pillar

Date

ca. 1709-1710

Creator

Working well within the academic paradigm established in the seventeenth century, Watteau began a trend away from classicism and toward delicacy and light, apparent here in his treatment of the individual figure. Gone are the heavy limbs and heroic gestures of antique sculpture. Instead, fashionable men and women lounge and lean casually, often in park-like settings or sumptuous domestic interiors. They rarely look directly at the spectator, but tilt their heads coyly or demurely to the side, their gaze averted. Rather than the geometric handling of form and the planar arrangement of space embraced by artists such as [Simon] Vouet and [Michel] Dorigny, we see broken contours, short jagged strokes, and uneven modeling of light and shade. from Snay, The Epic and the Intimate: French Drawings from the John D. Reilly Collection (Notre Dame, 2011)