Calle Watteau

The name comes from Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), a painter born in Valenciennes a few years after that city became French. He worked in Paris and shaped a new genre, the fêtes galantes: scenes of ladies and gentlemen who talk, court and play music in gardens, against a melancholy backdrop. His Pilgrimage to Cythera entered the Academy in 1717 under a category created for it. He died at thirty-six, apparently of tuberculosis, after less than two decades of work. The Prado and the Thyssen-Bornemisza hold works of his in Madrid. Calle de Watteau is a short street in Delicias, within the group of streets named after painters that orders the area. There is no record of the council decision that fixed the name.