Watteau - kolonial

What were the early visions of Empire in Regency France? The book offers a interpretation of Jean-Antoine Watteau's Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (1717) by framing it in the context of French colonial expansion in the years of the Regency. Born in Louis XIV's reign, galant aesthetics contributed to frame the colonial encounter in French America. Fantasies of maritime departure, embarkation and/or debarkation, also expressed a longing for colonial travel and exploration. The imperial imagination fueled with codes of galanterie was very developed in the circles of Watteau's amateurs. From Watteau's Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera (1717) to its visual reenactment in 1763, the book argues that galanterie served as a visual and conceptual model of French commercial and colonial relations.