La Perspective

In the notarial records of eighteenth-century Paris, by far the most common category of picture in the inventories of all classes is that of devotional images, the larger part of these being simple depictions of Christ, the Virgin, and various saints...

Among the arabesques engraved by Huquier in the style of Watteau some years after the latter’s death are two matching plates. Both depict figures in ornamental gardens: a bacchante in a wild landscape where trees and reeds border a deep ravine, and ‘gallants’ in a French-style garden of symmetrical design with clipped yews and statues linked by a colonnade rising...