those aspiring to an aristocratic lifestyle to acquire their own art collections served as a metaphor for the
controversial materialism of their taste and, by extension, their lives:
It seems to be a misfortune bound to the richest productions of art, to fall in the hands of people who
appreciate less their value than that of the gold used to acquire them.
(From his 1748 Lettre sur la peinture, la sculpture et l’architecture à M***, cited in Ebeling, 2007, 77)The lifestyles and aspirations of the wealthy were also represented more indirectly, in the early eighteenth
century, through the dreamlike fantasies of Watteau’s new genre, the fête galante. These paintings
lacked the heroic modes of representation or serious moral intent of history painting and, although they
drew at times on mythological themes, they were more closely related to street theatre and masquerade.
Watteau has been described (Plax, 2000, 1–2) as “toying” with generic categories and conventions. His
fêtes galantes represented the aristocracy at leisure in elaborate garden parties, fantasy excursions,
masquerades and theatrical performances influenced by popular theatre, the fairground and ballet. His
powers of invention and technical accomplishments gained him in 1712 full membership of the Académie
royale in Paris (B. Gaehtgens, 2003, 50) and he was allowed, unusually, to submit his reception piece
some years later. This was his famous Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (Le Pèlerinage à l’île de
Cythère, 1717) (Figure 2.13). As this work did not fit the requirements for a traditional history painting
(or in this case the conventions of paintings documenting heroic court events), a special membership
category, that of painter of fête galantes, was invented for him. Cythera had initially been classified as a
history painting – it did after all include some references, however indirect, to Venus (represented in the
painting in sculptural form), and to the morality of love and flirtation, at least as much as Boucher’s erotic
fantasies did – but the association with classical culture was less evident or serious than ultimately
required in the history genre (Plax, 2000, 148). The case illustrates well the pragmatism of academies
wishing to embrace the talented even when traditional hierarchies would seek to exclude them.