Actor Standing with Head Turned to the Right

Antoine Watteau’s delicate chalk drawings and poetic, sparkling cabinet paintings have been celebrated since the moment he made them. He filled sketchbooks with figure studies—countless women and men in graceful poses and stylish clothes—to create the gorgeous cast that inhabits the alluring world of his pictures. The young man in this study appears as a flirtatious actor in one of the artist’s late paintings. Tipping his head, bowing to his left, and raising his cape, the figure strikes a theatrical pose that distills his amorous longing. The atmospheric treatment of light and shadow and the generalization of forms toward abstraction are characteristic of Watteau’s later draftsmanship.