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Lot Essay
As Watteau’s only true pupil, Jean-Baptiste Pater built his career on the shoulders of his teacher, mastering the genre of the fête galante, and quite naturally stepping in to fill the void left in the market by Watteau’s untimely death in 1721. He devoted himself almost entirely to painting fêtes galantes, military scenes and theatrical subjects in the manner of Watteau. His most original compositions are depictions of village fairs, such as The Fair at Bezons (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), erotic genre scenes illustrating the tales of La Fontaine, and a series of bathers.
The Stafford Concert Champêtre amply displays the charms of Pater’s art at its most seductive. In a lushly overgrown park, with towering trees of Summer green and autumnal reds, a group of ten young men and women– several making music as two amorous couples absent themselves into the woods – play instruments, prepare to sing, and flirt with each other, while two children amuse themselves at a distance, quietly observing the adults; through the allée of trees, a small village with a church tower can be glimpsed. The airy composition fans out with an altogether pleasing rhythm and gentle grace. The figural groupings in Pater’s painting unfold in a serpentine line running across the middle ground of the canvas, scattered with poses and vignettes familiar from the paintings of Watteau: the playfully erotic garden sculpture that seems to comment on the human activities taking place below it; the seated couple fumbling and falling into an embrace; the young women flirting with the gallants who serenade them.
As in Watteau’s fêtes galantes, the lovers in the present painting wear an imaginative mixture of contemporary clothing and fancy dress, with the women in elegant street clothes and the men in theatrical costume. Pater would undoubtedly have selected from his large repertory of small, quickly observed, red-chalk studies on which to base each of the participants, but he also modelled the central figure of a seated woman leafing through a songbook on a trois crayons drawing by Watteau, now in the Art Institute of Chicago (c. 1717; inv. 1958.8; R/P538). Unlike Watteau, who took great pains to recreate accurately the precise fingering employed by the flutists and lute-players that he painted, Pater makes no effort to anatomize the process of music-making and renders his models’ fingers schematically. He does, however, capture with force and economy a quality of intense concentration in the musicians’ faces, and he shapes their figures into pleasing silhouettes. The easy humor that characterizes the art of Pater is on clear display here, as is his fine touch, feathery brushwork and unmistakable palette of pearly pinks, silvery greys, milky ivories and acid blues.
The Stafford Concert Champêtre amply displays the charms of Pater’s art at its most seductive. In a lushly overgrown park, with towering trees of Summer green and autumnal reds, a group of ten young men and women– several making music as two amorous couples absent themselves into the woods – play instruments, prepare to sing, and flirt with each other, while two children amuse themselves at a distance, quietly observing the adults; through the allée of trees, a small village with a church tower can be glimpsed. The airy composition fans out with an altogether pleasing rhythm and gentle grace. The figural groupings in Pater’s painting unfold in a serpentine line running across the middle ground of the canvas, scattered with poses and vignettes familiar from the paintings of Watteau: the playfully erotic garden sculpture that seems to comment on the human activities taking place below it; the seated couple fumbling and falling into an embrace; the young women flirting with the gallants who serenade them.
As in Watteau’s fêtes galantes, the lovers in the present painting wear an imaginative mixture of contemporary clothing and fancy dress, with the women in elegant street clothes and the men in theatrical costume. Pater would undoubtedly have selected from his large repertory of small, quickly observed, red-chalk studies on which to base each of the participants, but he also modelled the central figure of a seated woman leafing through a songbook on a trois crayons drawing by Watteau, now in the Art Institute of Chicago (c. 1717; inv. 1958.8; R/P538). Unlike Watteau, who took great pains to recreate accurately the precise fingering employed by the flutists and lute-players that he painted, Pater makes no effort to anatomize the process of music-making and renders his models’ fingers schematically. He does, however, capture with force and economy a quality of intense concentration in the musicians’ faces, and he shapes their figures into pleasing silhouettes. The easy humor that characterizes the art of Pater is on clear display here, as is his fine touch, feathery brushwork and unmistakable palette of pearly pinks, silvery greys, milky ivories and acid blues.