Colour and line
Watteau drawings

Antoine Watteau (probably 1684–1721) was one of the most influential, prolific artists active in 18th-century France. In a short career lasting little more than a decade, he pushed painting in new directions that were to guide generations of French artists, blending genre, mythology and rococo frivolity in works so novel that they heralded a new genre: the fête galante.

Watteau won particular renown for the thousands of drawings he produced during his life. Drawing, as contemporaries realised, was his favourite creative outlet, bringing him 'much more pleasure than his finished pictures'. He drew incessantly, and developed ideas about the value of drawing that were every bit as original as his paintings. Instead of making figure studies for a picture as academic practice dictated, Watteau drew speculatively, conceiving ideas that might be slotted into a picture months or even years later. The sheets he produced were to be enjoyed in their own right as the first, freshest iterations of ideas that he thought were dulled when translated into paint.

Nowhere were these qualities more appreciated than in Britain, and over the past two centuries British collectors have endowed the British Museum with one of the finest collections of Watteau drawings in the world. Featuring almost every autograph work in the collection, this display is the first exhibition of the Museum's Watteau holdings to be held since 1980. Its varied contents demonstrate Watteau's extraordinary talent as a draughtsman, his sophisticated, novel approach to drawing, and the prestige that his graphic works enjoyed among Europe's connoisseurs.