La Surprise: Watteau in Los Angeles

Jean-Antoine Watteau, La Surprise, ca. 1718-19, Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

La Surprise: Watteau in Los Angeles brings together a dozen paintings and drawings from public and private collections in celebration of a recent Getty painting acquisition, La Surprise by Jean-Antoine Watteau. This painting, added to the collection in 2017, was considered by Watteau’s contemporaries to be one of his best fêtes galantes, and was thought for more than a century to have been lost. The painting joined an already rich array of Watteau’s drawings and paintings in Los Angeles. From their juxtaposition in the exhibition illuminating relationships emerge: we see chalk studies and their transformation into painted figures, an original drawing and its counterproof (mirror image), pictures executed at different moments that hung as companion pieces in the houses of 18th-century collectors. These happenstance connections shed light on Watteau’s methods and on the captivating yet still elusive quality of his art.