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Lot Essay
Born to a family of ornamental sculptors and gilders, Le Prince trained with Boucher beginning around 1750. He is said to have travelled to Italy – perhaps to escape an unhappy marriage, undertaken in 1752 – but his first documented trip was to Russia, where he arrived in July 1757. He was received by the French envoy to St. Petersburg, the Marquis de l’Hôpital, and was commissioned to execute more than 40 overdoors to decorate the newly constructed winter Palace of Empress Elizabeth. Le Prince was said to have travelled extensively during his five years in Russia, as far east as Siberia, and continued to receive Imperial commissions from Peter III until his return to France in 1762.
Once back in Paris, the many drawings that Le Prince had made in Russia provided the basis for ‘exotic’ paintings that he would produce until the end of his career. He was received as a member of the Académie Royale in 1765 with of painting of a Russian Baptism (Musée du Louvre, Paris), and showed 15 paintings at the Paris Salon that year, all of Russian subjects. He thrived as well as a printmaker and tapestry designer for the Beauvais. After 1770 ill-health was said to slow the artist and prompted him to concentrate more on landscapes and pastoral and genre subjects, such as the present picture.
Signed and dated 1775 and perhaps depicting ‘The Embarkation to Cythera’, the present painting is one of Le Prince’s largest canvases and was coupled – until the Lockett Agnew sale at Christie’s in 1949 – with a pendant, depicting Harvesting Fields (see the exhibition, France in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1968, no. 435). Madame Adélaïde, daughter of Louis XV, owned a painting by Le Prince of a comparable subject that was exhibited at the Salon of 1775 under the title Des voyageurs attendent le bac; however, discrepancies in the recorded dimensions of that painting preclude us from identifying it with the present lot with certainty. Although the present composition, with its young couples setting off for the boat that will carry them to the Isle of Love, pays obvious homage to the fêtes galantes of Watteau, Lancret and Pater from a half-century earlier, its closest comparison is to the large fête decorations of Fragonard, such as The Progress of Love series in the The Frick Collection, The Fête at St. Cloud (Banque de France, Paris) and The Swing and Blindman’s Buff (figs. 1 and 2; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). These large-scale decorations in which small figures in opulent ‘fancy’ dress flirt and make music in towering parkland settings also date to the early and mid-1770s. But unlike Fragonard, Le Prince brings to this elegant, decorative genre a Flemish palette and landscape manner inflected with memories of 17th-century Dutch painters such as Allart van Everdingen, whose works were included in Le Prince’s own art collection.
Once back in Paris, the many drawings that Le Prince had made in Russia provided the basis for ‘exotic’ paintings that he would produce until the end of his career. He was received as a member of the Académie Royale in 1765 with of painting of a Russian Baptism (Musée du Louvre, Paris), and showed 15 paintings at the Paris Salon that year, all of Russian subjects. He thrived as well as a printmaker and tapestry designer for the Beauvais. After 1770 ill-health was said to slow the artist and prompted him to concentrate more on landscapes and pastoral and genre subjects, such as the present picture.
Signed and dated 1775 and perhaps depicting ‘The Embarkation to Cythera’, the present painting is one of Le Prince’s largest canvases and was coupled – until the Lockett Agnew sale at Christie’s in 1949 – with a pendant, depicting Harvesting Fields (see the exhibition, France in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1968, no. 435). Madame Adélaïde, daughter of Louis XV, owned a painting by Le Prince of a comparable subject that was exhibited at the Salon of 1775 under the title Des voyageurs attendent le bac; however, discrepancies in the recorded dimensions of that painting preclude us from identifying it with the present lot with certainty. Although the present composition, with its young couples setting off for the boat that will carry them to the Isle of Love, pays obvious homage to the fêtes galantes of Watteau, Lancret and Pater from a half-century earlier, its closest comparison is to the large fête decorations of Fragonard, such as The Progress of Love series in the The Frick Collection, The Fête at St. Cloud (Banque de France, Paris) and The Swing and Blindman’s Buff (figs. 1 and 2; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). These large-scale decorations in which small figures in opulent ‘fancy’ dress flirt and make music in towering parkland settings also date to the early and mid-1770s. But unlike Fragonard, Le Prince brings to this elegant, decorative genre a Flemish palette and landscape manner inflected with memories of 17th-century Dutch painters such as Allart van Everdingen, whose works were included in Le Prince’s own art collection.