Julie Anne Plax’s Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France belongs to what we might call the “third wave” of writing on Watteau that has transpired during the two centuries following the artist’s own. The first, nineteenth-century manifestation of Watteau writing presented the paintings as dreamy, imaginative poems and the artist himself as a melancholy visionary. Early in the following century began a second, more objectivist trend that sought to codify and interpret the artist’s oeuvre through historical documentation, connoisseurship, and iconographic studies. This “second wave” of writing on Watteau culminated in 1984 with an international exhibition and catalogue and two major monographs. The 1980s also saw the initiation of a new trend in Watteau scholarship that brought interdisciplinary theory and social history to analyses of the artist’s paintings, notably Norman’s Bryson’s semiotic approach in Word and Image: French Painting in the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Thomas Crow’s use of Marxist theory and social art history in Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). These books prepared the groundwork for several subsequent studies, including Plax’s, that have explored Watteau’s work for its subtle references to contemporary culture, for its...