Under arching tree boughs, villagers play music while a toddler amuses a dancing couple with his imitation of the young maid's graceful movements. Watteau's merry subject recalls the scenes of fairs, peasant weddings, and country dances by Flemish artists like Pieter Bruegel and Peter Paul Rubens, whose raucous and earthy Kermess had been in the French royal collection since 1685. This is perhaps Watteau's earliest known painting, made shortly after he emigrated to Paris from the historically Flemish city of Valenciennes. Compared to their Flemish forebears, however, Watteau's dancing peasants are civilized, even ennobled. Their movements are contained and courtly, and some are smartly dressed. Rustic music, usually accompanying debauchery and drunkenness, here alludes to the natural harmony of social and familial order. The musicians engage the viewer with halting, coy glances suggestive of the mutual awareness between actor and spectator so characteristic of Watteau's art.
Watteau reworked his northern European subject in an emphatically Venetian style. Both the nostalgic interpretation of peasant life, and the soft, atmospheric effect reveal the French artist's debt to Venetian landscapes, with their pastoral love themes, paradisiacal settings, and painterly brushwork. In the context of contemporary academic debates about the merits of drawing versus color, Watteau's Country Dance was a declaration in favor of the power of color to conjure an idyllic world of pure pleasure, adding momentum to the 18th-century style known as Rococo.
[Watteau], a pupil of Gillot, Flemish by birth, succeeds very well in grotesques, landscapes, fashions.
-Collector Carl Gustaf Tessin, 1715
