Curating Watteau’s Soldiers – by Aaron Wile

Aaron Wile | Journal 18 | 12th July 2016

Watteau is renowned for his picnic scenes in idyllic landscape settings. Less well known are his works dealing with military subjects. These were not standard genre scenes. He depicted soldiers in groups, physically close but withdrawn into themselves, forced into “a troubled and uneasy social commerce, which … marks the modernity of his representation of military life” An excellent video (4 min) is here.