Watteau's world

I'm reading Jed Perl's "Antoine's Alphabet," a book about the French painter Antoine Watteau. Perl makes an alphabetical attempt at putting Watteau at the center of modern Western painting. Every letter of the alphabet has entries that range from informative to descriptive to tangential. Under "F," for example, Perl writes about Fans, Flaubert, Flirtation, Fragments, and Friendship. Some of the entries are just anecdotes from Perl's life that have to do with Watteau's themes; others are stories about people indebted to Watteau or concerned about his influence. And what is Watteau all about? This paragraph struck me as an enticement:

The human mind is artless, elegant, clumsy, penetrating, chaotic, obscure, a hopeless mix of serenity and hysteria, the lofty and the low-down, clarity and murk, and Watteau pulls his drawings and paintings straight out of this messy material, these moment-to-moment shifts in perception, apprehension, and feeling. His paintings suggest a mind that is, like all our minds, at once self-indulgent, unreliable, relentless, lucid, obtuse, unruly. And like the rest of us he allow his thoughts to drift, his moods to shit, his focus to go out of focus. We've all woken up in the morning feeling blue and then, an hour later, unaccountably, felt cheerful. Or vice versa. We know what it means to be confounded by our own emotions. Watteau's working methods, so far as we can see, mingled long periods of meditation and periods of frantic labor. He was willing to fuss over small things and do big things quickly, and by utilizing this erratic approach, he somehow managed to transcribe the vagaries of the human mind onto canvas, giving the painting a psychological texture like nothing else in the history of art. We accept Watteau's opacitites and obscurities becase we know what it is like to find ourselves, in the midst of even the simplest task, thinking about something entirely different.