Reflecting the Rococo: Lancret and Boucher

Mary Tavener Holmes has written an engaging introduction to Nicolas Lancret's early picture Dance before a Fountain(ca. 1723), which came to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2001 via the Russian Imperial Collections during the reign of Catherine the Great, then via private collections, including those of the twelfth Earl of Pembroke, as well as Baron Gustav de Rothschild and his descendants (82–92). A Lancret specialist, Holmes writes in a lively, sometimes anecdotal, fashion, solidly basing her research on primary and secondary sources.

Her small book is clearly aimed at the educated general reader, although art historians can occasionally glean new information and insights from it. Despite the generalist nature of the book, Holmes draws heavily on her exhibition catalogue, Nicolas Lancret, 1690–1743(New York: The Frick Collection, 1991). The book is effectively organized into ten brief chapters addressing a variety of issues, including the artist, his production, his milieu, and the picture itself, ending with an essay by Mark Leonard of the Getty Conservation Department on the restoration of the picture (95–106). Many of Lancret's most famous paintings are reproduced in dazzling color, and they are effectively coordinated with the text, but Holmes does not analyze them.

As Holmes points out, Nicolas Lancret is relatively unknown in the United States, despite his enormous success in early eighteenth-century Paris, the city of his birth, his production, and his death. He was reçuas a full member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1719 and rose to its highest rank—conseiller—in 1735. His pictures were much in demand among enlightened connoisseurs, including Jean-François Leriget de la Faye, the presumed patron of Dance before a Fountain(89–90), and among the sovereigns of Europe, with Louis XV and Frederick the Great at the top of the list. Lancret's obscurity is also baffling because he was the author of a colossal oeuvre, which the Lancret specialist Georges Wildenstein estimated at about seven hundred works.

Undoubtedly, the major reason for Lancret's obscurity is that scholars have cast him in the shadow of his brilliant older contemporary and paragon, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), the creator of the fête galante,the genre in which Lancret worked. Holmes defines the fête galante,of which Dance before a Fountainis a notable example, as an image that "depicts a gathering of attractive people in a cultivated landscape or garden, engaged in leisure activities" (13), chiefly "the drama of love" (69). But as Holmes demonstrates, Lancret was no dramatist, even though characters from the theater populate many of his pictures. As the most talented heir to Watteau, he transferred the fête galantefrom the innovator's enchanted realm of poetic ambiguity to the quotidian, chatty sphere of Parisian genre painting after Watteau's death in 1721. Lancret reified the fête galantevia his expressive characters, vivid coloration, and narrative clarity. He was no slouch: as a cultivated artist, he imbued his ostensibly prosaic pictures with sophisticated iconography, allegorical allusions, and complex conceits, which he gleaned from popular prints, literature, and emblems. He also achieved something significant that Watteau did not: he helped to establish genre painting as a legitimate—and popular—form of art-making in early eighteenth-century Paris (27).

In particular, Holmes devotes three chapters to the painting itself: a general description (but no analysis) of it (9–12), its setting (52–68), and the dancers and their choreography, which comprise its fulcrum (69–76). As to the setting, Holmes reveals that Lancret loosely based the monumental fountain at the extreme right of the Danceon the actual fountain that Marie de Médicis had constructed for the gardens...