_Antoine Watteau_, who guided the stream of French art into this new channel--of the Netherlands--was by birth and training a Fleming. His birthplace, Valenciennes, although French territory since the Peace of Nymeguen, resembled in its whole character a Flemish town. In the church here he first saw any of Rubens' pictures. Here, through Gérin, he became instructed in Flemish traditions. Rubens and Teniers are the two masters from whom his own art sprang. During the years when the war of the Spanish Succession had changed the French frontier provinces into a huge military camp, he painted soldiers and camp scenes, such as the "March" in the collection of Edmund Rothschild, where a party of recruits are straggling along a high plain in a fierce storm. Later came pictures of country life in the manner of Teniers, like the "Retour de Guinguette," engraved by Chedel, a landscape in which on the right a party of rustics are carousing at a table in front of a farmyard, while on the other side half-drunken men and women are going home. Louis XIV had made before the pictures of Teniers his well-known _mot_: "_Otez moi ces magots_." Now, through Watteau, the _magot_ makes its entrance into French art. Thus in his chief picture in this manner, "La Vraie Gaieté," the figures are unmistakably after Teniers. The men are short and sturdy, entirely Flemish. Only the costumes have changed with the mode. But the women are not in the least Flemish. The clean caps and tidy kerchiefs, the freshly ironed aprons, and neat little feet that trip so lightly and quickly along the street that no dirt seems to soil them, give these peasant girls a certain desirability in which it is not hard to discover the transition to French grace. The elegant motions and fine heads point to that Watteau who was to become soon afterwards the unsurpassable delineator of feminine coquetry.