With his head and upper body, the satyr looms over the hips of the sleeper in order to gaze upon her – he licks his lips lustfully.

His suntanned skin and muscular body forms a clear contrast with the softly worked, shapely Antiope.

According to this myth, Antiope, the beautiful daughter of King Nycteus of Thebes, was surprised and seduced by Zeus in the form of a satyr.

She became pregnant and bore the twins Amphion and Zethus, who later killed Nycteus' brother Lycus in revenge for his treatment of Antiope and took over the city of Thebes.

Accordingly, both nymphs and satyrs are very regularly depicted in mythology – and thence also in their subsequent artistic reception – in erotic contexts and are accordingly favoured topics of art.

In the art historical literature, the assumption that the painting was created as a commission for the banker Pierre Crozat under the instruction of Watteau's teacher Charles de La Fosse around the time of the creation of the four Seasons prevails.

La Fosse encouraged Watteau who had not practiced history painting hitherto to take on the work of the allegories of the Seasons, since he himself was not in the neighbourhood anymore.

The Seasons seem to have been designed as oval paintings with mythological scenes intended to decorate Crozat's dining room.

In parallel with this series, Watteau produced a range of other paintings, which dealt with the theme of the mythological nude in this same oval format which was at that time unusual.

No sketches of Antiope are known, but Watteau had already produced a great number of female nudes and studies which he could draw on for this painting.

Watteau returned to the theme of the sleeping nymph in his 1719 painting The Elysian Fields, a scene of the gardens of the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Here he depicted a stone copy of Antiope wearing a crown as a monument on the pedestal at the right hand side of the painting, as a kind of "living sculpture" which is typical of Watteau.

This is claimed in an exhibition catalogue from Vienna in 1966 and remains the most widely accepted theory in art history to this day, but it still cannot be proven.

In 1857 the painting appeared at the auction of the collection of Theodore Patureau in a catalogue in which it was listed as a former possession of Prince Paul d'Arenberg.

The old theory that the final private owner, Louis La Caze had made alterations to the painting can also now be considered disproven.

Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume published by Diogenes Verlag since 1985 has a detail from Jupiter and Antiope on the cover with the armpit of the naked sleeper in the centre.

The same image has been used on all versions of the cover except the American paperback edition (where it was prohibited to depict a women's nipple), thus the book has made Watteau's Antiope famous worldwide.