Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Le Départ pour l’Ile de Cythère

The rediscovery of a major addition to the small canon of paintings by the French master, Antoine Watteau. Le Pèlerinage a l’Ile de Cythère provides a crucial, previously unknown stage in the creation of the artist’s most celebrated masterpiece, The Embarkation to Cythera in the Louvre Museum in Paris and will be offered as part of Christie’s Old Masters sale on 25 January in New York. Alan Wintermute, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Watteau’s paintings, discusses this exciting discovery with an overview of its history and a thrilling technical analysis of the painting itself.


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