Les Amusements de l'Enfance

The present lot appears to be a preparatory sketch for one of a series of four large paintings with children as their subject that the Marquis de Marigny, Directeur Général des Bâtiments du Roi, commissioned Bachelier to produce around 1758. The compositions, for which he was to be paid 4,000 livres each, were intended as cartoons for a tapestry cycle that would have been woven at the Gobelins Manufactory and sent to the Château de Saint-Hubert. Bachelier only executed a single composition, Les Amusements de l'Enfance, which corresponds to the present sketch and is housed in the Musée de Picardie in Amiens. Although the tapestries were never produced, the painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1761, where it won high praise from Denis Diderot. A highly finished, autograph ricordo of the composition executed on copper is in the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris.