Jean-Antoine Watteau

Baptised in October 1684, Watteau worked fast and died young at 37 in July 1721. In that narrow span he pulled painting away from the formal severity of the Baroque, reviving the colorist tradition of Correggio and Rubens and steering it toward something more naturalistic and less rigid. His fêtes galantes—bucolic scenes suffused with theatrical air and idyllic charm—became a genre of their own. He drew often from Italian comedy and ballet, and the movement and color he reintroduced shifted the course of 18th-century art before tuberculosis ended him.