LANCRET, Nicolas

Four large-scale decorative canvases emblematizing the ‘Four Seasons’ were commissioned around 1720 by Jean-Fran�ois Leriget de la Faye (1764-1731), one of the most enlightened and distinguished patrons of the arts in R�gence Paris. He was a diplomat, military man and connoisseur of art, music, ballet and theater, an amateur poet with enough merit to claim a seat in the Acad�mie Fran�aise.

By 1721, Watteau was dead and Lancret would have emerged as his undisputed successor as master of the fête galante. The commission would be the most important of Lancret’s early career - indeed, one of the most important he would ever receive - coming as he was first establishing himself as an independent artist.

Lancret’s four paintings are wholly modern. With each canvas measuring c. 115 cm high and enlivened with a dozen or more figures, the artist represented each season of the year in lively scenes of contemporary city or country life, cloaked in fashionable dress and surroundings. The paintings are sparkling in execution, bright and richly coloured, and filled with carefully observed and often witty vignettes of men and women enjoying the pleasures of leisure time. The artist exemplified each season by its effect on human pleasure and merrymaking, showing the different forms of entertainment they offered: savouring grapes and wine in Autumn, bird catching in Spring, bathing in Summer, and playing cards by a cozy fire in Winter.

This is from the early period of the artist showing the strong influence of Watteau.

This painting shows the characteristics of Lancret’s late style. In a vaulted hall two elegant couples play billiards. A mother and her young daughter are depicted in the foreground and a couple sit on a sofa beneath a classical sculpture beyond. A sunlit garden is seen through the doorway.

The game of billiards was very popular with the nobility in France. Louis XIII and Louis XIV were both enthusiastic players and it was said that Marie-Antoinette spent the eve of the French Revolution playing billiards with members of the court.

The beginning of the 18th century saw the introduction of a new genre within French painting, fêtes galantes or “elegant parties”, which feigned to depict the aristocracy and their ritualised social gatherings, pastimes, and courting. Several later painters adopted elements from the genre but combined it with more rustic settings and characters, thereby creating more everyday-like scenes.

Lancret was a painter of rustic entertainments and the theatre. Although he borrowed Watteau’s thematic repertory and style, he does not attain the universal, poetic dimension of his work.

The decorative pendants, Le Moulinet, and Dance in a Pavilion, are typical of Lancret’s art, with women who are almost alarmingly unindividualized and men but a bit more identifiable.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: La Danza

The composition reflects Lancret’s dependence on Watteau, under whom he had briefly studied c. 1717. Watteau’s profound poetic feeling becomes in Lancret no more than a picturesque and amiable evocation of the life of society.

This painting is the largest of four variants of this subject painted by the artist; smaller versions are in the Wallace Collection, London, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, and the Mus�e des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. The Washington version is the only one in which Camargo is accompanied by a male dancer and several spectators.

In a clearing among elegant trees in an ideal parkland setting, a couple is dancing a duet, the woman shown to most advantage in a shimmering silver dress adorned with flowers in her hair. A group of five musicians, under the trees at left, provides the accompaniment.

This painting, representing a family in the garden, was exhibited in the Salon of 1742, the last in Lancret’s lifetime, and is a masterpiece, emancipated from all influences. The family anecdote is charming, just tinged with humour, the figures themselves have a flower-like charm and freshness, anticipating early portraits by Gainsborough. According to the Salon livret the family are taking coffee, and the younger girl is obviously experiencing her first taste of it. It might almost be her first taste of the grown-up world, exchanged for the doll discarded in the foreground, but Lancret is too delicate and delightful for such moralizing. The secluded garden with its graceful sweep of fountain and tall, flower-entwined urn is decor which almost succeeds in convincing the spectator it could exist, and much the same is true of the cluster of hollyhocks amid which a dog chews his bone - fashionable hollyhocks dyed to suit Lancret’s palette.

This canvas is a characteristic ‘fête galante’ from the mature period of the artist. It can be compared with the paintings from the same period representing the dancer Mademoiselle Camargo.

The decorative pendants, Le Moulinet, and Dance in a Pavilion, are typical of Lancret’s art, with women who are almost alarmingly unindividualized and men but a bit more identifiable.

Like the Merry Companies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Lancrets, such as the Repas Italien, are feasts in the open air.

This painting is a replica of a larger painting by Lancret, Luncheon with Ham (Chantilly, Mus�e Cond�), commissioned by King Louis XV in 1735.

One of the most celebrated dancers of her day, she was twenty when Lancret painted this portrait of her in character; it was immediately engraved. Camargo was famed for the innovations she brought to her art, while her biography has been highly coloured, especially concerning her amorous affairs.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Gioacchino Rossini: La Danza

By inventing the genre of hunt picnic, Watteau, Lemoyne, and now Lancret blended the hunting picture with scenes of aristocratic dalliance, the recently developed genre of fête galante. The proximity in date of the examples by Lemoyne and Lancret, and Lancret’s subsequent popularisation of the theme, show the degree to which the hunt picnic gave expression to the identity of the aristocracy. Although traditionally the hunt defined this elite class, Louis XV’s passion for the sport made it that much more popular with his courtiers and ministers. As exemplified in de Troy pendants - Le D�jeuner de chasse (Mus�e du Louvre, Paris) and the Mort d’un cerf (location unknown) - the culture of the hunt was characterised by oppositions: bloodshed and a celebration of the harmony of nature. Lancret, however, oriented his depictions of the theme almost exclusively toward the pleasant rituals surrounding the hunt.

Pierre Mangot (1706-1777) was nominated Counselor for France’s Great Council in 1742 and was secretary for the king that same year. The Mangot family appears to have had close ties with the Lancrets over several generations.

Lancret, a pupil of Antoine Watteau, displays a Dutch influence, reflecting the shift in tastes among collectors and artists in the early 18th century. The work is also a composite of predictable elements: a Franco-Dutch idyllic landscape, a sumptuous dress taken from formal portraits, and a handful of musicians in the Rococo tradition. Stylisation can hardly explain the ungainly pose of the famous Marie-Anne Camargo (1710-1770), who introduced into female ballet the rapid unrestrained movements previously used only by men.

Four large-scale decorative canvases emblematizing the ‘Four Seasons’ were commissioned around 1720 by Jean-Fran�ois Leriget de la Faye (1764-1731), one of the most enlightened and distinguished patrons of the arts in R�gence Paris. He was a diplomat, military man and connoisseur of art, music, ballet and theater, an amateur poet with enough merit to claim a seat in the Acad�mie Fran�aise.

By 1721, Watteau was dead and Lancret would have emerged as his undisputed successor as master of the fête galante. The commission would be the most important of Lancret’s early career - indeed, one of the most important he would ever receive - coming as he was first establishing himself as an independent artist.

Lancret’s four paintings are wholly modern. With each canvas measuring c. 115 cm high and enlivened with a dozen or more figures, the artist represented each season of the year in lively scenes of contemporary city or country life, cloaked in fashionable dress and surroundings. The paintings are sparkling in execution, bright and richly coloured, and filled with carefully observed and often witty vignettes of men and women enjoying the pleasures of leisure time. The artist exemplified each season by its effect on human pleasure and merrymaking, showing the different forms of entertainment they offered: savouring grapes and wine in Autumn, bird catching in Spring, bathing in Summer, and playing cards by a cozy fire in Winter.

Watteau died young, but the overtones of his unconventional art were imitated by several skillful painters. One of them, Nicolas Lancret placed greater emphasis on the landscape and, even when he retained silky garments, rendered the poetry of group scenes anecdotal.

This is a preparatory study for the man wearing mustard yellow in the centre foreground of Picnic after the Hunt, who holds up a biscuit for one of the dogs straining against its leash. Lancret established the pose of the body with black chalk, highlighting the figure with white, but he indicated the face and hands of the figure only indistinctly.

Four large-scale decorative canvases emblematizing the ‘Four Seasons’ were commissioned around 1720 by Jean-Fran�ois Leriget de la Faye (1764-1731), one of the most enlightened and distinguished patrons of the arts in R�gence Paris. He was a diplomat, military man and connoisseur of art, music, ballet and theater, an amateur poet with enough merit to claim a seat in the Acad�mie Fran�aise.

By 1721, Watteau was dead and Lancret would have emerged as his undisputed successor as master of the fête galante. The commission would be the most important of Lancret’s early career - indeed, one of the most important he would ever receive - coming as he was first establishing himself as an independent artist.

Lancret’s four paintings are wholly modern. With each canvas measuring c. 115 cm high and enlivened with a dozen or more figures, the artist represented each season of the year in lively scenes of contemporary city or country life, cloaked in fashionable dress and surroundings. The paintings are sparkling in execution, bright and richly coloured, and filled with carefully observed and often witty vignettes of men and women enjoying the pleasures of leisure time. The artist exemplified each season by its effect on human pleasure and merrymaking, showing the different forms of entertainment they offered: savouring grapes and wine in Autumn, bird catching in Spring, bathing in Summer, and playing cards by a cozy fire in Winter.

Allegories of the seasons were very popular in the 18th century and Lancret turned to the subject on a number of occasions, repeating this series several times. Bathing on a sunny day is immediately evocative of the heat of summer and provided an opportunity to depict female figures in a state of undress. The decorative nature of the painting and its hint of eroticism in the relaxed bathers, unselfconsciously displaying their breasts, made the series popular with contemporaries.

Watteau’s originality could be copied but not kept alive once Watteau himself was dead. He created a vogue, and this perhaps damaged his own art in the eyes of the next generation. Without Watteau the fête galante was soon to dwindle to triviality, but his example gave further impetus to the uncoordinated desire for freedom. The difficult balance between decoration and genre was to be held best in France by Nicolas Lancret, immensely successful during his lifetime, but who has perhaps suffered too much in reputation for his proximity to Watteau. Frederick the Great felt none of this, and collected both painters in quantity. Lancret did not attempt any psychological insight, but his eternal charm and his keen eye for contemporary manners led to pictures which occasionally are minor masterpieces.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 19 minutes):

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme

The woman in Lancret’s painting ignites passion’s fire in a nasty fusion of innocence and calculation. (The painting is also entitled as Woman Igniting Passion’s Fire.)

Nicolas Lancret was a follower of Watteau. He imitated Watteau’s style and also dedicated himself to painting fêtes galantes. However, in his work the theme of the fête galante has evolved closer to a scene from everyday life.

This painting may have formed part of a set of four canvases on the subject of the four seasons. The fruits being picked and handled suggest that this canvas may have represented summer.

Lancret is regarded alongside Jean-Baptiste Pater as the most important representative of the many artists influenced by Watteau, most of whom chose individual motifs or groups from his “fete galante” and made them independent themes. This process alone is indicative of a specific tendency in Rococo: the tendency towards small scale, intimate scenes. In Lancret’s painting The Swing we find a highly popular motif of the time, treated not only by Fragonard, Boucher and Pater, but also by lesser painters of the era. Just what made the swing such a popular theme becomes clear here.

It is not only the erotic aura, whose “moment of happiness” is to be found in a glimpse under the petticoats, but also the fact that the swing is a metaphor of an interim realm belonging neither to the earth nor to the air. It remains intangible, allocated neither to an element nor to a physical place. Non-committal coquettishness, the freedom of intimacy, the bonds that do not tie: all these are evoked by the rope with which the desiring cavalier is moving the swing, not as a symbol, but certainly as an obvious suggestion.

This painting is a study for a larger one which belonged to a cycle of eight canvases depicting exotic hunt scenes. The cycle was commissioned for one of the small royal apartment if the castle of Versailles from Jean-Fran�ois de Troy, Fran�ois Boucher, Charles Parrocel, Nicolas Lancret, Jean Baptiste Vanloo and Jean Baptiste Pater. The cycle is now conserved at the Mud�e de Picardie, Amiens.

Four large-scale decorative canvases emblematizing the ‘Four Seasons’ were commissioned around 1720 by Jean-Fran�ois Leriget de la Faye (1764-1731), one of the most enlightened and distinguished patrons of the arts in R�gence Paris. He was a diplomat, military man and connoisseur of art, music, ballet and theater, an amateur poet with enough merit to claim a seat in the Acad�mie Fran�aise.

By 1721, Watteau was dead and Lancret would have emerged as his undisputed successor as master of the fête galante. The commission would be the most important of Lancret’s early career - indeed, one of the most important he would ever receive - coming as he was first establishing himself as an independent artist.

Lancret’s four paintings are wholly modern. With each canvas measuring c. 115 cm high and enlivened with a dozen or more figures, the artist represented each season of the year in lively scenes of contemporary city or country life, cloaked in fashionable dress and surroundings. The paintings are sparkling in execution, bright and richly coloured, and filled with carefully observed and often witty vignettes of men and women enjoying the pleasures of leisure time. The artist exemplified each season by its effect on human pleasure and merrymaking, showing the different forms of entertainment they offered: savouring grapes and wine in Autumn, bird catching in Spring, bathing in Summer, and playing cards by a cozy fire in Winter.

Lancret’s allegory of Winter depicts the everyday pleasures of upper-class society in early 18th-century France, set in a stately R�gence interior. A group of figures are gathered in a refined drawing room; a fire lit in the background and fur-lined overgowns worn by the elegant ladies identify the season as winter. A card game is taking place at the table; some players are discussing strategy while others seem lost in thought, and the woman sitting at the center looks directly out at the viewer rather than at her hand. Two women nearby are reading a score while a third stands behind them, seemingly humming along. The young lady in the foreground entertains a kitten, while an older woman sits by the fire in the background, a small dog in her lap.

In addition to its allegorical subject of Winter, the painting is one of the earliest known depictions of a R�gence interior. In decorative arts, R�gence was the transition style between Louis XIV’s Baroque and Louis XV’s Rococo.

Lancret received early instruction in engraving and drawing, then at the age of 17 became the assistant of the history painter Pierre Dulin in Paris. He was not very successful in this field and the hoped for Rome prize of the Academy was not forthcoming, so on entering the studio of Gillot, who had also been the master of Watteau, Lancret gave up history painting. Two landscapes secured him membership of the Academy in 1718. His pictures show from the very beginning the influence of Watteau, with whom he soon quarrelled. A renewed attempt at history painting failed in ¹⁷²³⁄₂₄. He now devoted himself to the pastoral idyll and “fetes galantes”. His pictures made him something of a mediator between Watteau and Fragonard, although he never achieved their subtle poetic qualities.

Lancret’s allegory of Winter depicts the everyday pleasures of upper-class society in early 18th-century France, set in a stately R�gence interior. A group of figures are gathered in a refined drawing room; a fire lit in the background and fur-lined overgowns worn by the elegant ladies identify the season as winter. A card game is taking place at the table; some players are discussing strategy while others seem lost in thought, and the woman sitting at the center looks directly out at the viewer rather than at her hand. Two women nearby are reading a score while a third stands behind them, seemingly humming along. The young lady in the foreground entertains a kitten, while an older woman sits by the fire in the background, a small dog in her lap.

In addition to its allegorical subject of Winter, the painting is one of the earliest known depictions of a R�gence interior. In decorative arts, R�gence was the transition style between Louis XIV’s Baroque and Louis XV’s Rococo.

Lancret’s allegory of Winter depicts the everyday pleasures of upper-class society in early 18th-century France, set in a stately R�gence interior. A group of figures are gathered in a refined drawing room; a fire lit in the background and fur-lined overgowns worn by the elegant ladies identify the season as winter. A card game is taking place at the table; some players are discussing strategy while others seem lost in thought, and the woman sitting at the center looks directly out at the viewer rather than at her hand. Two women nearby are reading a score while a third stands behind them, seemingly humming along. The young lady in the foreground entertains a kitten, while an older woman sits by the fire in the background, a small dog in her lap.

In addition to its allegorical subject of Winter, the painting is one of the earliest known depictions of a R�gence interior. In decorative arts, R�gence was the transition style between Louis XIV’s Baroque and Louis XV’s Rococo.