Nicolas Lancret, 'A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children', probably 1742

A wealthy family enjoy coffee beside a fountain in parkland. The mother offers a spoon from her cup to her little daughter, while the father sits beside them holding the tray as their servant pours coffee from the pot into his cup. The painting is more likely to be a genre scene than a portrait as none of the figures shows any awareness of the viewer, as would be usual in a portrait.

This painting used to be known as ‘La Tasse de Chocolat’ (‘The Cup of Chocolate’) until it was noticed that the pot is one generally used for serving coffee. This suggestion is supported by the presence of the sugar pot on the tray. Sugar lumps, as shown here, would be added to coffee rather than hot chocolate. When sugar was added to chocolate it was always in powdered form rather than in lumps. As further evidence, when a version of the painting was shown at the 1742 Salon, it was described as: ‘A lady in a garden having coffee with children.’

Drinking coffee was advised in the morning and after lunch. The direction of the light in the painting suggests that this is a morning scene. People who drank coffee for pleasure rather than for medical reasons usually had it served on coffee trays in cups made of porcelain, glass or faience. In this painting, the sugar bowl and the cups and saucers appear to be of early eighteenth-century Saint-Cloud soft-paste porcelain. It has been suggested that the subject matter of this picture indicates the importance that wealthy families attached to educating a child’s taste in coffee drinking.

It is possible that the painting was intended as part of a set for a decorative scheme by one or more artists, but we do not know for certain if this was the case. If so, the picture may have been intended to represent Taste in a series of the five senses.

The fashion for painting Parisian society at leisure had been boosted by the exhibition of Watteau’s Gersaint’s Shop Sign (Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin). The poses of the father and mother in Lancret’s painting are similar to those of the woman leaning on the counter and the sales lady in Watteau’s work, while the servant holding the coffee pot resembles in reverse Watteau’s shop owner. However, it is unclear whether Lancret was consciously borrowing from Watteau at this late stage of his career. If so, he did it with great imagination to create a painting entirely different in tone and subject matter from anything by Watteau.

The sentiment displayed by the figures, their solid positioning in space, the compositional balance between the triangle made by the family group and the circular form of the fountain and the play of strong colours across the picture’s surface make this one of Lancret’s most accomplished paintings.