After the King

Musicologist Georgia J. Cowart explores how Antoine Watteau’s late paintings reimagine the symbolic order of absolutism in the wake of Louis XIV’s death.

Antoine Watteau has long been known for the theatricality of his paintings, but what that theatricality signifies has remained elusive. In After the King, Georgia Cowart contends that this mode of painting takes shape in response to the spectacle of Louis XIV’s absolutism, which the painter’s late works transform into a new aesthetic language.

The king’s death marked a turning point in Watteau’s art. In the six years that followed, his paintings turned more decisively toward the musical stage. Evoking theatrical plots, frontispieces, and costume types, they conjured a world in which the legacy of absolutist culture lingered as stylized memory—its rituals, emblems, and pleasures recast through theatrical illusion and ironic distance.

Rather than treating Watteau as a painter of nostalgic reverie or Rococo charm, Cowart situates his art within the immersive performance culture of Versailles and the vibrant Parisian stage, at a time when the opéra-ballet, popular opera, and the commedia dell’arte were charting new theatrical landscapes. Drawing on art history, musicology, theater studies, and Pierre Nora’s theory of lieux de mémoire, she proposes a new framework that understands Watteau’s paintings as acts of theatrical memory and cultural recomposition. 

Elegantly written and conceptually ambitious, After the King reveals how Watteau recoded the symbols of monarchy to stage a post-absolutist cultural imagination shaped by irony, sensuality, and poetic transformation. 

Georgia J. Cowart is professor of music at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle, also published by the University of Chicago Press. From 2022 to 2024, Cowart served as president of the American Musicological Society.