Nicolas Lancret 1690–1743
NG 6422 
A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children

Humphrey Wine, 2018

Extracted from:

Humphrey Wine, The Eighteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2018).
Humphrey Wine and Virginia Napoleone, Former Owners of the Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings in the National Gallery: Appendix to ‘The National Gallery Catalogues: The Eighteenth‐Century French Paintings’ (London: National Gallery Company, 2018).

Probably 1742

Oil on canvas, 89.2 × 97.3 cm

Provenance

Bought in 1860 by Samuel Jones Loyd (1796–1883; created Baron Overstone, 1849)¹ of 2 Carlton Gardens, London, and Overstone Park, near Northampton;² by inheritance to his son‐in‐law Robert James Lindsay (1832–1901, who assumed the name Loyd‐Lindsay in 1858 and was created Baron Wantage of Lockinge in 1885) and to his only surviving child, Harriet Sarah Loyd‐Lindsay (née Loyd) (1837–1920), both of 2 Carlton Gardens, London and of Lockinge House, near Wantage, Berkshire;³ on Lady Wantage’s death in 1920, inherited together with Lockinge House (where NG 6422 was recorded in the drawing room in July 1936)⁴ by a cousin, Arthur Thomas Loyd (1882–1944);⁵ sold by order of the executor of Arthur Thomas Loyd deceased, Sotheby & Co., 28 November 1945, lot 88, £12,500; bought by Agnew’s, London for Sir John Heathcoat‐Amory, 3rd Baronet (1894–1972)⁶ of Knightshayes, near Tiverton, Devon;⁷ bequeathed by him to the National Gallery in accordance with a previous promise,⁸ subject to a life interest to Lady Joyce Heathcoat‐Amory (née Wethered) (1901–1997),⁹ who renounced her interest in 1973.

Exhibitions

Paris Salon 1742 (50), or an autograph replica of the same size as no. 49, a portrait of the actor, Grandval ¹⁰ (‘Autre d’environ la même grandeur [4 pieds sur 3 & demi de large] représentant une Dame dans un jardin, prenant du Caffé avec des Enfans’); London 1898 (84, there described as ‘A Garden Party’ and as lent by Lord Wantage); London 1913 (16, there called ‘La Tasse de Chocolat’, as lent by Lady Wantage),¹¹ London 1925 (24); London 1932 (225, as ‘La Tasse de Chocolat’, lent by Arthur Thomas Loyd, Wantage), and Commemorative Catalogue 1933, no. 190 and pl. 53;¹² Oxford 1934–5 (3); King’s Lynn 1965 (16); London 1968 (383); New York and Fort Worth 1991–2 (18); London, Norwich and Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne 1997; Bristol and Bolton 2001; Ottawa, Washington and Berlin 2003–4 (17).

Related Works

No related drawings by Lancret are known, nor was any print made after NG 6422.

Technical Notes

The support is a plain‐weave canvas with an average thread‐count of 14 horizontal and 12 vertical threads. As there are no selvedges, it is difficult to tell which is warp and which weft. It was lined sometime before the painting’s acquisition by the Gallery, since when it has not been treated. There is some wear of the surface paint throughout, some flattening of the paint through lining of the canvas, small abrasions in the tree at left, the servant’s legs and at the edges, a small loss near the centre about a third of the way down the canvas, and a few small filled holes in the canvas near the bottom. The ultraviolet fluorescence photograph shows evidence of retouchings (not necessarily to cover losses) along the edges and in the upper right corner, as well as scattered retouchings mainly in the trees behind the ornamental pond.

The ground of most of the composition is a pale grey colour. However, the infrared reflectogram (fig. 1) shows curved areas in the upper corners which are darker than the rest of the sky, where the ground is a lightish brown. Other areas that appear dark in the infrared reflectogram are the middle parts of the left and right edges and the bottom corners. These correspond with shapes visible in the X‐radiograph and indicate that the canvas was first stretched onto a shaped support, probably for incorporation into a decorative scheme, before being re‐stretched to a rectangular shape. Pigment analysis reveals that the same type of early Prussian blue as was used for the sky in the top corners was used elsewhere in the painting, indicating that the re‐stretching occurred early in the life of NG 6422.

The infrared reflectogram shows some underdrawing, clearest in the figures, consisting of simple outlines made with paint that are difficult to distinguish from outlines in the surface paint, except where the figure was later changed, for example the mother’s left foot. It also shows changes made during the painting of the picture, some also visible to the naked eye. These changes fall into two categories: those to the hands, feet and draperies of the figures and the positions of the heads of the children, the elder of which appears to have two sets of eyes, and changes made when the canvas was re‐stretched to a rectangular shape. A large building and tree in the background behind the figures at the left was then painted out and the manservant was moved towards the new left edge of the canvas. Also evident from the infrared reflectogram is the fact that the dog was painted over the architecture, and the doll painted over the foreground. Between the two was some unidentified object that looks like the stem of a goblet lying on its side. The blue and white flowers, which were painted over the dog, must have been added by Lancret last of all.

The back of the stretcher bears the following marks or labels: (1) ‘G MORRILL’;¹³ (2) ‘Thos Agnew & Sons Ltd / No 11629 / Fine Art Publishers to HM King George V / London / 43 Old Bond St / Piccadilly W’; (3) ‘Thos Agnew & Sons Ltd / W.O. 0441 / 73’; (4) in pencil, ‘119’; (5) in ink, ‘WO /9399/2’; (6) in ink, on what is possibly only a fragment of a label, ‘19’; (7) in white chalk, ‘CAT 383’ (see Exhibitions, London 1968); (8) in pencil, ‘Glos 38/4 x’ (which may be the partial record of a measurement).

The back of the frame bears the following labels: (1) inscribed in ink on a nineteenth‐century (?) label with a blue border, ‘L [illegible] [? illegible]’; (2) a circular, perforated label on which no writing is visible; (3) ‘Department of Fine Art / Oxford, / Loan Exhibition Of Lockinge House Pictures No. 3 / 1934/5’; (4) ‘Painter or School–’; in manuscript, ‘Lancret / Date of Arrival’; in manuscript, ‘8 April 1946’.

Discussion

When NG 6422 was exhibited at the Frick Collection in 1991–2 Mary Tavener Holmes noted that its traditional title (La Tasse de chocolat) was a misnomer because the silver pot held by the servant was a coffee pot.¹⁴ Although the Encyclopédie illustrated a pot somewhat similar in shape to that in NG 6422 as ‘une caffetière brune propre à faire toutes sortes de liqueurs’ (‘an earthenware cafetière appropriate for making all sorts of drink’),¹⁵ and Nicolas de Blegny had written that a pot of similar design could be used indifferently for coffee, tea, or chocolate,¹⁶ he illustrated pots of quite different shape for tea as opposed to coffee. The pot in NG 6422 broadly conforms to that illustrated by de Blegny for coffee.¹⁷ On the evidence of Boucher’s Morning Coffee (fig. 2), which shows that, at least in well‐off households, differently shaped pots were used for each drink, tea can be excluded. As regards the possibility that the pot in NG 6422 is for chocolate, it has been proposed that it is being used for coffee because the sucrier on the tray would have only accompanied coffee.¹⁸ It does indeed seem to be the case that when sugar was added to chocolate it was done in the making, or sometimes after it was served, but in either case in powder rather than lump form.¹⁹ Thus the lumps of sugar shown here exclude the possibility that the drink being consumed is chocolate. If there remains any doubt about its identity as coffee, the description of the painting (or perhaps of the version exhibited of which NG 6422 is an autograph replica)²⁰ in the livret of the 1742 Salon (‘A lady in a garden having coffee with children’) should dispel it. Drinking coffee was advised during the morning and after lunch.²¹ The presence of summer flowering hollyhocks at bottom right and the direction of light in NG 6422 suggestt that a morning scene is shown.

The pot in NG 6422 is similar to a silver coffee pot on tripod legs with a blackened pearwood handle made between 1730 and 1732 by Gabriel Tillet (Bordeaux, Musée des arts décoratifs). Although that example was made in Bordeaux, a similar design was used throughout France for heating drinks,²² albeit sometimes made from a less precious material than silver. De Blegny had observed that people of quality who drank coffee for pleasure rather than for medical reasons usually had it served on coffee trays, in cups made of glass, porcelain or faience.²³ In NG 6422 the sucrier and the cups and saucers appear to be of early eighteenth‐century Saint‐Cloud soft‐paste porcelain.²⁴

The question of whether NG 6422 is a family portrait or a genre picture has been discussed by Holmes²⁵ and more recently by Gage.²⁶ Both concluded that it was a genre picture, Holmes on account of the description of the picture (or the exhibited version)²⁷ in the 1742 Salon livre t . This refers to ‘des Enfans’ rather than ‘ses Enfans’, as one might more likely expect were a portrait being signalled. That point, however, is not conclusive and Gage’s reason for rejecting the painting as a portrait, namely that none of the protagonists intimates any awareness of the beholder, is perhaps more persuasive. It is the case that even where in group portraits of the period none of the sitters makes eye contact with the beholder, for example Hogarth’s The Strode Family (about 1738) and the same artist’s Ashley Cowper with his Wife and Daughter (1731),²⁸ there are strong elements of posing. Such is not the case in NG 6422, in which the protagonists are shown interacting naturally, apparently unaware of the viewer. Holmes, moreover, rightly pointed out the resemblance in subject matter between NG 6422 and François Boucher’s then recently painted Morning Coffee (fig. 2), a painting that Laing has correctly concluded was more probably a genre picture than a family portrait.²⁹

It has been suggested that the subject matter of Morning Coffee indicates the importance attached in affluent families to the education of a child’s taste in the consumption of coffee.³⁰ By extension the same could be argued in respect of NG 6422. Laing noted that Boucher’s painting appeared at auction accompanied by two genre images of high society by Jean‐François de Troy.³¹ Hence, although there is no evidence that Lancret was aware of the composition of Boucher’s painting – the child’s doll near the right‐hand bottom corner of both paintings as well as their similar subject matter may be no more than coincidence – NG 6422, like Boucher’s painting, should be regarded as participating in the vogue in Paris for such genre images, of which the main creator during the 1720s and 1730s was Jean‐François de Troy.³² The probability that NG 6422 was originally configured as if it were part of a decorative scheme (see Technical [page 304] Notes) also makes it more likely to be a genre painting than a portrait. If indeed it was first conceived as part of such a scheme, no suitable companion(s) have been identified. However, given that Lancret’s Le Repas de chasse and Les Plaisirs du bain (both Paris, Louvre, invs RF 1990‐19 and RF 1990‐20) have been shown to have been part of the same decorative scheme, despite that fact that they are not self‐evidently related iconographically nor (now) of the same size,³³ technical analysis of paintings in other collections may yield a candidate. In addition, it is conceivable that NG 6422 was intended to partner a painting or paintings by one or more artists other than Lancret.³⁴ If indeed NG 6422 was originally conceived as one of a set, then, given motifs of the young child about to sip coffee and of the dog licking something (on which see below), it is possible that it may once have been planned to represent the sense of Taste in a series of the Five Senses.

Representations of French high society drinking coffee or chocolate had been in circulation since publication in Paris of gravures de mode in the later seventeenth century.³⁵ The vogue for painting Parisian society at leisure had doubtless been boosted by the exhibition of Watteau’s Gersaint’s Shop Sign (fig. 3).³⁶ Lancret was in Paris in 1720 and if he did not see Watteau’s painting that year, when it was briefly shown above the dealer Gersaint’s shop, he would have had adequate opportunity to familiarise himself with its composition when painting NG 6422, either by direct access to the original when it was in the collection of Jean de Jullienne³⁷ or through the print made after it by Pierre Aveline and published in 1732.³⁸ At all events, the poses of the father and mother in NG 6422 are similar to those of (respectively) the woman leaning on the counter and the vendeuse in Watteau’s work, while Lancret’s servant holding the coffee pot may have started life in Aveline’s [page 305]reverse image of Watteau’s shop‐owner expounding on a work from his stock.³⁹

Another painting by Watteau, Fêtes vénitiennes (Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland), also in Jean de Jullienne’s collection when Lancret painted NG 6422,⁴⁰ as well as the subject of an engraving in reverse made by Laurent Cars in 1732, shares with Lancret’s picture the main architectural motif (with variations of detail) of a curved stone fountain topped with a large urn prominently placed in the picture space. However, the motif of a large, prominent urn had already been used by Lancret in other compositions – La Terre (Madrid, Museo Thyssen‐Bornemisza), painted by 1732;⁴¹ Le Jeu de colin‐maillard (Potsdam, château de Sans‐Souci), painted by 1737;⁴² and La danse dans un parc (London, Wallace Collection), painted in 1738.⁴³ It was also part of a common artistic vocabulary shared by some of Lancret’s contemporaries, such as Jacques de Lajoue and Gilles‐Marie Oppenord.⁴⁴ In this instance it was more likely Oppenord rather than Watteau to whom Lancret looked for the fountain motif, if indeed he looked anywhere beyond contemporary parkland.⁴⁵

Lancret also incorporated a large garden urn in his Portrait of the Actor Grandval, which, like NG 6422, was shown at the 1742 Salon, of which a painting in Indianapolis may be a reduced‐size replica (fig. 4).⁴⁶ Unlike the urn in NG 6422, that in Grandval’s portrait is not overflowing with flowers, although both paintings have abundant flowering plants acting as a repoussoir at bottom right. In addition, as in others of Lancret’s later paintings, the figures in both NG 6422 and the Indianapolis painting have a greater monumentality than in his earlier works.⁴⁷ The motif of a dog licking, not merely sniffing, something on the ground – which does not occur for example in the work of the animaliers Jean‐Baptiste Oudry or Alexandre‐François Desportes – may also have its origin in another painting by Watteau, Le repas de campagne (whereabouts unknown). This was yet another of the many paintings by Watteau certainly in the Jullienne collection, if not at the time when Lancret painted NG 6422, at least in 1730, when publication of an engraving after it (in reverse?) by Louis Desplaces was announced in the Mercure de France (fig. 5).⁴⁸ Since dogs sometimes lick urine, usually that of other dogs,⁴⁹ Lancret may have intended the vulgarity of the motif to be in ironic contrast to that of the elegant family drinking coffee.

One might conclude from the references to works by Watteau, and in particular to those in Jullienne’s collection, that NG 6422 was itself commissioned by Jullienne were it not for the fact that so many of Watteau’s paintings were part of, or passed through, this collection.⁵⁰ Indeed, it is unclear whether Lancret at this late stage of his career was consciously borrowing from Watteau at all, especially since that artist’s works were scarcely present in his own collection.⁵¹ If he did, then it was done with great imagination to create a painting entirely different in tenor and subject matter from anything created by his predecessor, which ‘clearly illustrates the unjustness of Lancret’s dismissal by succeeding generations’.⁵²

Prior to the exhibition of NG 6422 in 1991 it attracted little recorded comment. L’abbé Desfontaines noted of Lancret’s pictures generally at the 1742 Salon: ‘M. Watteau’s rival, M. Lancret, has given us some excellent pieces this year. What engaging characters, what lightness of touch in the brushwork, what variety in the manner of using colour! How pleasing is the draughtsmanship! What landscapes! Throughout he is delightful and brilliant.’⁵³ However, an etching and engraving by Jacques‐Philippe Le Bas after Philippe Canot (died 1783), a pupil of Chardin, first published in Paris and Rouen in 1747, is clearly influenced by NG 6422 (fig. 6). In another etching and engraving by Le Bas after Canot entitled Le Gateau des Roys, the figure of the father is (in reverse) close to that of the father in NG 6422.⁵⁴ The painting then seems to have been unnoticed by commentators until late in the nineteenth century, when Lady Emilia Dilke expressed admiration for Lancret’s use of colour in NG 6422 and opined that ‘Rarely does he give us work as fresh and genial in sentiment’.⁵⁵ In 1911 Lady Victoria Manners was moved to write that Lancret, ‘by the magic of his brush, transports us into a world whose denizens we feel have left far, far behind The ways of care, / The crowded hurrying hour the dreary and wearisome path of most of the sons of men’.⁵⁶ The Times’s reviewer of the 1913 exhibition, however, was ambiguous: ‘… the well‐known “Tasse de Chocolat” or “Garden Party”, lent by Lady Wantage, is as good as anything of the kind could be’,⁵⁷ a sentiment echoing that of C.H. Collins Baker in his review of the 1925 exhibition: ‘as good as you could wish’.⁵⁸ When NG 6422 was exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum in 1934–5, where it was called ‘A Family Group (“La Tasse de Chocolat”)’, Harold Isherwood Kay, then Keeper and Secretary of the National Gallery, annotated his copy of the [page 306] catalogue: ‘Excellent condition. Yellow varnish. Rather swell. Full Rothschild quality. Fragonard took a lot from this type of Lancret.’ More recently NG 6422 was described as ‘exquisite’ and ‘of excellent quality’, but nevertheless classed as among examples of the type of picture that ‘the Trustees might not actually have wished to buy, given the very high prices they would surely have commanded’.⁵⁹

The sentiment between the individual protagonists, their solid positioning in space (unlike the precarious‐looking figures in many earlier pictures by Lancret), the compositional balance between the triangle made by the family group and the circle in depth of the fountain, and the play of strong colour across the picture’s surface, place NG 6422 among the artist’s late works (whether or not it was exhibited at the 1742 Salon)⁶⁰ and justify its status as one of his most accomplished paintings.⁶¹

General References

[Guiffrey] 1874, p. 39, no. 26; Dilke 1898, p. 334 (as attributed to Lancret); Temple 1898, p. 8 (reproduced); Loyd‐Lindsay 1902, no. 119 (reproduced, as at Lockinge House, Berkshire); Temple 1905, no. 119; Foster 1905, vol. 1, pl. LIII (as belonging to Lady Wantage); Wildenstein 1924, pp. 19, 66, no. 621; [Loyd] 1928, p. 19;⁶² Commemorative Catalogue 1933, no. 190 and pl. 53; List of the Pictures at Lockinge House, Wantage, July 1936, no. 36;⁶³ The National Gallery 1975, p. 24; Wilson 1985, p. 88; Huot de Saint Albin 2003–4, vol. 2, pp. 310–11, no. 73 (in correctly as still at Knightshayes Court); Levey 1993, pp. 43–4; Sanchez 2004, vol. 2, p. 966.

Notes