After the King: Watteau, Spectacle, and the Poetics of Memory

"Like all artists, Antoine Watteau worked under the constraint of monarchical authority. Watteau's elusive relationship with Louis XIV was shaped not by proximity or patronage, but by the king's immersive performance of absolutism. In After the King, musicologist Georgia J. Cowart explores how Watteau's late paintings reimagine the symbolic order of absolutism in the wake of Louis XIV's death. For Cowart, Louis XIV's death marked a turning point in Watteau's art. In the six years after the king's death, Watteau's paintings engaged more with the musical stage, evoking theatrical plots, frontispieces, or costume types to conjure a world in which the legacy of absolutist culture lingers as stylized memory--its rituals, emblems, and pleasures recast through theatrical illusion and ironic distance. Cowart proposes a new approach to Watteau's art by placing it within what she calls a dialogue of theaters, a dynamic interplay among the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, the Comédie-Italienne, the Comédie-Française, and the legacy of the court spectacle. By considering how theatrical works may have influenced Watteau's art, Cowart proposes performance as a medium of memory, a means of reconfiguring the seventeenth-century ritual and theatrical traditions that linked Parisian spectacle to the ancien régime. After the King offers a new understanding of Watteau as an artist who did not merely depict but actively staged a new France"-- Provided by publisher.