The Dreamer (La Rêveuse)

A young woman in a loose white cap and russet dress sits with chin on hand, lost in a reverie against a quiet landscape. The Dreamer (La Rêveuse), painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau in 1712–14, is one of the small cabinet pictures of single figures he produced in the years before the great fêtes galantes; the panel is tiny, barely larger than a book, yet in it Watteau already shows the tenderness and melancholy that set him apart from the glitter of the Regency: the figure is turned inward, her gaze unfocused, the world around her dissolving into soft green and amber light. It is the rarest kind of Rococo picture — one that holds its silence — and it announces the poetic inwardness of all that followed. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.