A seated woman nursing a child

This sketch of a woman and her child, executed in red and brownish red chalk, was used for one Pater’s most important military paintings, Les Vivandières de Brest in the Wallace Collection, London (inv. P452; see F. Ingersoll-Smouse, Jean-Baptiste Pater, Paris 1921, no. 405, fig. 107). The composition became well-known after 1760 thanks to an engraving by Jacques-Philippe Le Bas. The subject recalls Watteau’s early pictures of soldiers resting (cfr. A. Wile, Watteau’s Soldiers. Scenes of military life in eighteenth-century France, exhib. cat., Frick Collection, New York, 2016).