19th c. Framed Tapestry

Found in Avignon, this 19th-century tapestry shows a garden full of silk-dressed company gathered around a fountain, music playing while couples drift through the trees. The scene is a fête galante, the dreamy picture of aristocrats at leisure that Watteau invented in early-18th-century France and that decorators copied for a hundred years after. It was always a fantasy more than a record, a world of endless afternoons in the garden with nothing to do but flirt and listen to music, woven here to hang on a wall and hold that daydream. Sylvie hangs it large where it can pull a whole room back a few centuries.