On 18 July 1721, the French artist Antoine Watteau died in only his thirty-seventh year. Three hundred years later, the J. Paul Getty Museum has commemorated his short life with the exhibition ‘La Surprise’: Watteau in Los Angeles (23 November 2021 – 20 February 2022), for which this slender volume serves as the catalogue. In addition to honouring the artist — surely one of the greatest in the history of Western art — the book celebrates a specific work of art. Watteau, best known as the originator of the fête galante (the contemporary term given to poetic scenes of aristocrats at play in garden settings), left behind an important body of red-chalk drawings but fewer paintings, and those are often diminished by conservation issues, for he was known to work quickly and experimentally, without regard for long-term durability. Because of the relative rarity of this painted œuvre, and because American collectors came to the market later than their counterparts in France, Germany, and Britain, characteristic paintings by Watteau are now scarce in American museums. Even the powerful Getty Museum — a bastion of eighteenth-century French painting thanks to the efforts of former curator Scott Schaefer — had long languished without a fête galante by Watteau. This was rectified in 2017 by Richard Rand, the museum’s deputy director and resident dix-huitiémiste, with the purchase of La Surprise (c. 1718–19), the sparkling gem that is the focal point here. Painted on a tiny bit of panel, La Surprise depicts a young couple seated on a grassy bank and locked in a passionate embrace, against the rosy light of a setting sun. They seem oblivious to the presence of a third figure who is dressed in the characteristic ruff and pink silk costume of Mezzetino, a stock character from the commedia dell’arte who was commonly known for his trouble-making ways. Here, the trickster tunes his guitar while casting a quizzical glance in the direction of the impassioned lovers. With its refined impastos, luminous, Rubensian palette, and mysterious mise en scène, the painting has been celebrated since the eighteenth century. Its arrival in Los Angeles is particularly apt because, as new technical research proves, it is closely related to L’Accord parfait (c. 1719), another small work on panel by Watteau that has long been a jewel of the neighbouring Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Although this book consists only of three succinct essays, it offers an informative contribution to the vast literature on Watteau. Rand sets the stage with an essay on Watteau’s biography and an assessment of his critical fortune three hundred years on. The Getty’s head of paintings, Davide Gasparotto, traces the distinguished provenance of La Surprise, and lays out the evidence for its relationship to L’Accord parfait, a revelation that flows seamlessly into curator Emily A. Beeny’s lyrical meditation on the Californian taste that has now made Los Angeles a surprisingly rich locus of paintings and drawings by Watteau. Like the work of art it so beautifully evokes, Watteau at Work appears slight but its thought-provoking observations carry the reader into realms of surprising profundity.