BUCOLIC IDYLLS OF COURTING COUPLES | July 6th 2008

Watteau painted slowly and died young, leaving few paintings behind. The discovery of a lost painting after 200 years has created a stir, writes Fiammetta Rocco, the Books and Arts editor of The Economist ...

It is easy to dismiss Jean-Antoine Watteau as the Barbara Cartland of early 18th-century French painting. That would be a mistake. True, his bucolic idylls of courting couples and little lapdogs have a domestic theatricality that has fallen from fashion, but they are unique for their wistful mood about melancholy and the transient nature of love. And there is a sensibility that anticipates the art of the future by painters like Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec--of art being about art, the world of art as seen through the eyes of an artist.

Watteau painted slowly and died young, leaving only a small body of work behind. No wonder the discovery of a picture thought lost for 200 years has been causing something of a stir among art historians and dealers in fine art.

"La Surprise" has been known only by a Benoit Audran engraving of the painting dating from 1731. The original was thought to have been destroyed long ago, although a copy, which has sometimes been confused with it, has been in the Queen's collection at Buckingham Palace since 1814.

The original came to light last summer during a routine valuation of the contents of a British country house. It was hanging in a corner of the drawing room.

The picture is thought to have left France during the turmoil of the revolution. It was bought in 1801 by General Sir John Murray, a British soldier who fought alongside the Duke of Wellington in the Napoleonic wars and was known as a buyer of French paintings. His widow left it on her death in 1848 to London's National Gallery, which turned down the bequest when she insisted that a portrait of her husband should hang with it. Returned to her estate, it was bequeathed to a family friend from whom it has descended to the present owners.

Watteau had an unusual, improvisational way of composing his paintings. He was an extraordinary draughtsman, who spent a lot of time copying figures by Rubens and Veronese. He would choose several figures from his many bound books of drawings and then reproduce them on a canvas or wooden panel on which he had already painted a landscape background, adjusting the figures to fit.

This is exactly what happened with "La Surprise". An X-ray of the picture shows two standing figures on the right that have been erased and painted over, as well as the outline of a leg. The final composition is pure Watteau. In an idyllic parkland, a Commedia dell'Arte actor dressed as Mezzetin, a comic buffoon character who never gets the girl, sits on a bench playing the guitar. The sun is setting and he is looking across at a couple also sitting on the bench in a clinch so tight it is hard to imagine the damsel will not fall to the ground.

As always with Watteau, there is a nod to other painters. The amorous man and woman are copied from a pair of dancing figures in Rubens's famous "La Kermesse", which now hangs in the Louvre but which in Watteau's day was one of the treasures of the French royal collection. The dog in the corner who watches these yearning humans is also taken from Rubens's series about Marie de Medicis, then in the Luxembourg palace.

Watteau painted by building up layers of thin, delicate glazes. When his pictures are cleaned these glazes often come off, and the paintings lose their lustre and freshness. Unusually, "La Surprise" has not been cleaned for more than a century, and is in good condition. "This really genuinely is the best French 18th-century picture to come to the market for a generation," says James Bruce-Gardyne, a director of Old Master paintings at Christie's. Rarer even than "Le Verrou" by another French master of the next generation, Jean Honora Fragonard, which was sold in 1999 for a hammer price of £4.8m ($10.5m) against a top estimate of £1.4m. (The total price including commissions was £5.3m).

That said, selling Watteau is not easy. Only five paintings have been sold at auction in the past decade. One, "La Nymphe de la Fontaine", was subsequently twice sent for sale, once at Christie's in 2003 and again at a lower estimate at Sotheby's in 2007. Both times it failed. Watteau's "La Contredanse", sent to auction in 1998, did not sell either.

The record for a Watteau sold at auction is held by another painting showing Commedia dell'Arte figures in a landscape. Named "Le Conteur", it was sold by Christie's in December 2000 for £2.2m (£2.4m after commissions).

In 1999 the Ahmanson Foundation, a Los Angeles-based charitable organisation, bought "L'Accord Parfait", the sister painting or "pendant" to "La Surprise", as a gift for the Los Angeles County Museum. The two paintings had been separated long ago and "L'Accord Parfait" had belonged to the Iveagh family of Kenwood House since 1892. It was sold on their behalf by Simon Dickinson, a well-known London dealer, for about £4m. Not seen publicly for more than a century, "L'Accord Parfait" was the first Watteau to enter the museum and is on view in the Carter Gallery. A preparatory drawing for the same work is also in Los Angeles, at the Getty Museum.

"La Surprise" by Jean-Antoine Watteau is Lot 21 in Christie's sale of important Old-Master and British pictures in London on July 8th. Estimate £3m-5m.

(*Fiammetta Rocco writes the Art.view column on economist.com, and is the author of "The Miraculous Fever-tree".)