As the authorities of the National Gallery have never yet been so fortunate as to possess a Watteau, it is well for the nation that we have, at Dulwich, one beautiful and unexceptionable example of his art, and it is well too that that picture is now at Burlington House. This is the canvas known as a ‘Ball under a Colonnade’--the scene an arcade overlooking a garden; a lady and gentleman dancing a minuet in the foreground, and, to right and to left of them, groups of gay, happy people, disposed with Watteau’s naturalness and Watteau’s consummate skill. The condition of the picture is faultless, but this--with the great master of Valenciennes--is scarcely rare. Watteau’s method was not a method of experiment; his technique was as sound as his spirit was vivacious. What is more remarkable--what would be remarkable anywhere--is the perfection of accomplished workmanship, the carrying out to the end, with all the vividness of a sketch, of a conception definite and elaborate from the beginning. The colouring comes as an inheritance from the Venetian--as Watteau’s adaptation of the palette of the supreme decorators. There are many canvases by the master spirit of the French Eighteenth Century larger of touch than this one; there are few more happily intricate or truer to the graceful side of life, in a world finely imagined as well as finely seen. Next to this admirable picture, which only the Louvre, or Edinburgh, or, it may be, Potsdam, can surpass, hangs a beautiful and interesting work, avowedly by the pupil with whom Watteau was once angered, but with whom in his declining days he was generously reconciled, calling him to him, and imparting to him, as a final gift, what he could of the secrets of his art. To Mr. Alfred de Rothschild belongs ‘The Pleasure Barge,’ a work in which the foreground figures are on a larger scale than in the Watteau, and in which the handling is neat and obviously careful, even while it is broad. If Pater himself had been the inventor of the _genre_, or even, perhaps, if he had practised it in any fashion recognisably his own, this piece of delicate and painter-like work--which, as it is, no one with any true appreciation of the graceful can possibly dispraise--would have had a higher rank. As it is, we recognise the dexterous handiwork, the pupil’s strangely complete reception of his master’s spirit; but feel, at the same moment, that Pater is an echo rather than a voice--that his talent glowed only at the fire that Watteau lit.