of Audran, the keeper of the
Luxembourg Palace, without doubt exerted a very decided help in
determining the future course of his work.

When living with Audran, Watteau had every opportunity for studying the
works of the older masters, especially those of Rubens, whose
decorations, executed for Marie de Medici, had not at that time been
removed to the Louvre. Besides copying from these older pictures,
Watteau was employed by Audran in the execution of designs for wall
decorations, etc.

Watteau's two earliest pictures still in existence are supposed to be
the _Depart de Troupe_ and the _Halte d'Armee_, which were the first of
a series of military pictures on a small scale. To an early period also
belong the _Accordee de Village_, at the Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn
Fields, the _Mariee de Village_ at Potsdam, and the _Wedding
Festivities_ in the Dublin National Gallery.

In 1712 other influences began to work upon him. In this year he came
into contact with Crozat, the famous collector, in whose house he became
familiar with a fresh batch of the Flemish and Italian masterpieces. It
was at this time that he was approved by the Royal Academy, though he
took five years over his Diploma picture, "_Embarquement pour l'Ile de
Cythere_," which is now in the Louvre. Meantime the influence of Rubens
and the Italian masters--especially the Venetians, had greatly widened
and deepened his art, and these influences, acting on his peculiarly
sensitive temperament and poetical spirit, had a magical effect,
transforming the actual scenes of Paris and Versailles, which he painted
into enchanted places in

[Illustration: PLATE XXXIV.--ANTOINE WATTEAU

L'INDIFFERENT

_Louvre, Paris_]

fairyland, as he transformed the formal actual painting of the period of
Louis XIV. into the romantic school of the eighteenth century in France.
The setting of the famous pictures in the Wallace Collection, catalogued
as _The Music-Party_ or _Les Charnes de la Vie_ (No. 410), is a view of
the Champs Elysees taken from the gallery of the Tuileries. Who would
have thought it? And what does it matter, except to show how entirely
Watteau revolutionized the pompous and prosaic methods of his time by
investing the actual with poetry and romance.

Two other pictures at Hertford House, Nos. 389 and 391, were painted in
the Champs Elysees, and the figures are, for the most part, the same in
both, all three of these pictures are fine examples of the artis