THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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of course first dispenses all this domestic comfort by virtue of Dutch world trade. Pieter de Hooch also painted fashionable rooms in which ladies dance, dine, and play
music with cavaliers. The colour in the arches and pillared fireplaces becomes less warm in these, it is bluish and grey, the red of the costumes is hard. But even in the
court pictures there is still Lilliput, an elfin manner which protects and is itself protected. Illness, wildness, loudness, disruptiveness can neither be seen in the charming
format nor does it seem as if care itself could ever visit it.Rooms and windows looking out on to the street are painted as if there were no disruption in the world. The
grandfather clock strikes nothing but the evening hour, nothing is more than man can cope with, nothing is in a hurry.
Embarkation for Cythera
So placid is this nearness, but it is a feature of distance to be restlessly cloaked. To bind the searching glance to itself, to attract people precisely in so far as it is veiled.
The feeling is then erotic longing, when painted this longing is departure, romantic journey; thus every portrayal of erotic distance already expresses seduction. A
fundamental picture of this kind is Watteau's ‘Embarquement pour Cythère’; even its title is clearly utopian. Young men and ladies are waiting for the barque which will
bring them to the island of love. The way of passing the time in those days was the reason why Watteau's picture, that of an excellent but not exactly first­rate painter, is
able to give such a sensually striking delineation of wishful landscape. Even through precious­erotic diminution the Rococo period gives instead a concentrating, at least
isolating impression. Watteau painted his picture three times; the first version is based on a mere stage impression, the pastoral play ‘Trois Cousines’ (which lingered in
the memory right down to Offenbach's ‘La Périchole’). The arrangement of the figures is still wooden in the first version, the feeling still conventional, the time of day still
uncertain, the air not yet charged with expectation. On the face of it, the theme of the second and third version also seems conventional, in other words it stems from the
era of the secrets of the deer­garden and boudoir, one treated and coined thousands of times. In this respect its basis is merely the lecherousness of the court life of
those days and an interchangeable entertainment which was often more like eroticized boredom. But how extraordinarily the picture has put things right in the meantime,
how clearly an archetype of the romantic journey