Claude-Henri Watelet

It is followed by precepts in prose on Proportions, Ensemble, Balance or Weight and Movement of the figures, Beauty, Grace,[7] Harmony of Light and Colours, Effects, and the Expression of the Passions.

[12] Winckelmann took them to view the antiquities at the Villa Albani In the Essai sur les Jardins,[13] Watelet's experience of the Physiocrats informed his bucolic vision of a France that might be able to return to a simple agrarian economy based upon idealized models of the family-owned farm.

He declared his devotion to the philosophy of Rousseau in the opening pages of his garden treatise, which gave a detailed account of the laying out of a ferme ornée, such as the English poet William Shenstone had pioneered at The Leasowes, begun in 1743.

In the 1740s Jean-Baptiste Oudry had access to the overgrown gardens of the prince de Guise at Arcueil and often brought younger artists to sketch with him in the neglected grounds; Boucher accompanied him on several occasions.

In Greuze's portrait (illustrated above), Watelet is shown with calipers in hand and a bronze reduction of the Venus de' Medici on his bureau plat, as if in the process of determining the secret of perfect proportions of the female body.