''The Shepherds'' (French - ''Les Bergers'') is a c. 1717 painting by
Antoine Watteau, now in the
Schloss Charlottenburg
Schloss Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace) is a Baroque palace in Berlin, located in Charlottenburg, a district of the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf borough.
The palace was built at the end of the 17th century and was greatly expanded during t ...
in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
. It is the most finished version of a composition later reused by the same artist in ''
Pastoral Pleasure'' (c.1714-1716,
musée Condé).
Description and themes
It shows city-dwellers in the countryside pretending to be peasants. In the centre a young man dressed in an elegant doublet and a plumed beret dances what seems to be a
minuet with a young woman in a satin dress whilst a musician plays for them. One other couple observes the dancers, another couple whispers to each other and a third plays with a swing. Several details are directly inspired by the work of
Peter Paul Rubens
Sir Peter Paul Rubens (; ; 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque traditio ...
- the musician, his neighbour, the shepherd embracing the woman next to him and the dog in the foreground. The affected character of the scene is heightened by the presence of a real shepherd, whose sheep graze in the far right background, almost hidden by bushes. Overall the painting transposes French
pastoral poetry
A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music (pastorale) that depicts ...
of the time into painted form.
It refers to Poussin's ''
Bergers d’Arcadie'', but this is misleading since the pastoral paintings by Poussin show a mythological Arcadia peopled by idealised classical shepherds, with no trace of real contemporary shepherds. The shepherds painted by Watteau and written about by
Fontenelle are instead 'half-true', as Fontenelle himself later explained:
The style is close to the shepherd-lovers and wrapped-up shepherdesses of
abbé Du Bos. The figures' harmony with nature in Watteau's work was a convention in an aristocratic society which emulated an idealised pastoral state in the
gardens of Versailles
The Gardens of Versailles (french: Jardins du château de Versailles ) occupy part of what was once the ''Domaine royal de Versailles'', the royal demesne of the château of Versailles. Situated to the west of the palace, the gardens cover som ...
.
Analysis
References
Further reading
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Shepherds (Watteau), The
Musical instruments in art
Dogs in art
Paintings by Antoine Watteau
1710s paintings
Paintings in Schloss Charlottenburg