Question ID:PT13 S3 Q19 Passage:Late-nineteenth-century books about the French artist Watteau (1684–1721) betray a curious blind spot: more than any single artist before or since, Watteau provided his age with an influential image of itself, and nineteenth-century writers accepted this image as genuine. This was largely due to the enterprise of Watteau’s friends who, soon after his death, organized the printing of engraved reproductions of the great bulk of his work—both his paintings and his drawings—so that Watteau’s total artistic output became and continued to be more accessible than that of any other artist until the twentieth-century advent of art monographs illustrated with photographs. These engravings presented aristocratic (and would-be aristocratic) eighteenth-century French society with an image of itself that was highly acceptable and widely imitated by other artists, however little relationship that image bore to reality. By 1884, the bicentenary of Watteau’s birth, it was standard practice for biographers to refer to him as “the personification of the witty and amiable eighteenth century.” In fact, Watteau saw little enough of that “witty and amiable” century for which so much nostalgia was generally felt between about 1870 and 1920, a period during which enthusiasm for the artist reached its peak. The eighteenth century’s first decades, the period of his artistic activity, were fairly calamitous ones. During his short life, France was almost continually at war: his native region was overrun with foreign troops, and Paris was threatened by siege and by a rampaging army rabble. The dreadful winter of 1709, the year of Watteau’s first Paris successes, was marked by military defeat and a disastrous famine. Most of Watteau’s nineteenth-century admirers simply ignored the grim background of the works they found so lyrical and charming. Those who took the inconvenient historical facts into consideration did so only in order to refute the widely held deterministic view that the content and style of an artist’s work were absolutely dictated by heredity and environment. (For Watteau admirers, such determinism was unthinkable: the artist was born in a Flemish town only six years after it first became part of France, yet Watteau was quintessentially French. As one patriotic French biographer put it, “In Dresden, Potsdam, and Berlin I have never come across a Watteau without feeling refreshed by a breath of native air.”) Even such writers, however, persisted in according Watteau’s canvases a privileged status as representative “personifications” of the eighteenth century. The discrepancy between historical fact and artistic vision, useful in refuting the extreme deterministic position, merely forced these writers to seek a new formula that allowed them to preserve the desired identity between image and reality, this time a rather suspiciously psychic one: Watteau did not record the society he knew, but rather “foresaw” a society that developed shortly after his death. Stem:The author asserts that during the period of Watteau’s artistic activity French society was experiencing which one of the following? Correct Answer Choice:AChoice A:widespread social upheaval caused by war Choice B:a pervasive sense of nostalgia for an idealized past Choice C:increased domination of public affairs by a powerful aristocracy Choice D:rapid adoption by the middle classes of aristocratic manners and life-styles Choice E:a need to reconcile the French self-image with French social realities