'Escorte d'équipages'
by CARS, Laurent, Engraving
This engraving was made after a lost painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Watteau painted several compositions of military subject-matter most of which survived only in engravings. The ‘Escorte d’�quipages’ is the most sophisticated of these military scenes, organized into a microcosm which contains the experience not just of army life but of all life: at the centre of the camp, between flirting soldier and girl, and the cookpot suspended over a makeshift fire, at peace in contrast to the distant soldiers forming up around their commander, lies a sleeping baby.
The engraving of Laurent Cars catches a great deal of the lost painting.