Le Pèlerinage a l’Ile de Cythère, a rediscovery of a major addition to the small canon of paintings by the French master, Antoine Watteau. comes up at Christie’s Old Masters sale in New York on January 25. Larger in scale than most of Watteau’s paintings the oil on canvas provides a crucial, previously unknown stage in the creation of the artist’s most celebrated masterpiece The Embarkation to Cythera in the Louvre.
The picture was catalogued in detail in a number of 18th-century collections and clearly identified as a work by Watteau. During the 19th century the attribution was lost. It has now been reattributed. Contemporaneous attributions are further supported by extensive scientific examination which has revealed that the painting was created using Watteau’s distinctive methods with materials consistent in age and type with his work. The work is to be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné by Alan Wintermute.
