Nicolas Lancret: A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children

Nicolas Lancret, A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children, c.1742, National Gallery, London.

One of the treasures of the National Gallery in London is A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children by the French artist Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743)

The lady in Lancret’s painting appears to be giving her little girl a canard, a lump of sugar soaked in coffee – which some French mothers like to do even today. Canard is the French word for a duck, and the sugar lump dipped in coffee must be an allusion to a duck diving under the water. Lancret’s picture is a charming family scene, with a touch of humour, painted in the delicate colours of the Rococo style. The lady’s dress acts as the focus of the picture, and its colours of reddish orange and greenish blue are distributed in small touches throughout the painting: red flowers, blue sky, blue water. The composition is carefully constructed, with the family group forming a broad pyramid, balanced on the other side by a circular pool, and the two halves of the painting are divided by the tall urn in the centre. But this construction is skilfully masked by the soft forms of trees, flowers, and clouds, which all help to unify the painting.

The coffee and the sugar consumed by the family probably both came from the French West Indies. French coffee production rivalled that of the Dutch, whose coffee came from their own colony of Batavia (Indonesia). The silver coffee pot held by the servant in Lancret’s painting has a wooden handle to prevent the holder from being burned, and similar coffee pots are still in use today. The dainty coffee cups appear to be made of Saint-Cloud soft-paste porcelain (Wine 303). The coffee pot and the cups also act as status symbols indicating that the family has both money and taste.

The fashionably dressed lady is wearing an over-dress called a contouche, a kind of long cloak with sleeves, open at the front to reveal the dress beneath. The contouche combined with the dress allowed ladies to experiment with interesting colour combinations. There may also be an allusion to fashion in the doll that the little girl has discarded on the ground. It looks too large to be a child’s toy and is more likely to be a fashion doll – these were known as pandoras or poupées de mode – which were produced to advertise (to adults) the latest creations of the Paris fashion houses. When they had served their original purpose, perhaps these dolls were then given to little girls as toys. 

It would be natural to suppose that Lancret’s picture is a group-portrait of an actual family, but that is probably not the case: “The painting is more likely to be a genre scene than a portrait of a particular family as none of the figures shows any awareness of the viewer, as would be usual in a portrait” (National Gallery website). The faces of the figures are not highly individualised, which they would be in a portrait, and resemble the rather pinched faces found in other paintings by Lancret. When the picture was exhibited at the Salon exhibition of 1742 – probably the year it was painted – it was described as Une Dame dans un Jardin prenent du Café avec des Enfants, which again suggests it is not a portrait. But even though it is not a portrait, its format bears a close resemblance to a type of portrait known as a Conversation Piece – especially popular in England – portraying a group of family members, who are often engaged in an activity such as drinking tea or playing cards, sometimes with servants in attendance.

Although not portraits of individuals, the family in Lancret’s painting is clearly from the upper classes – but what particular class? This is more significant than one might think, because in eighteenth-century France there was a division between the nobles, who had special privileges (such as exemption from certain taxes), and the bourgeoisie who lacked these privileges. But the distinction between nobles and bourgeoisie was becoming blurred because the wealth of many noble families was  declining while the wealth of the bourgeoisie was rising. This situation was partly caused by the nobles’ disdain for money-making activities – apart from trying to squeeze more money from their over-burdened peasants. At the same time, the bourgeoisie displayed a more entrepreneurial spirit by engaging in banking, manufacturing, ship-owning, and the like. The profits from this allowed wealthy bourgeoisie to buy their way into the nobility by purchasing public offices from the Crown (these often came with a noble title) or by marrying into the nobility.

A parallel trend was for nobles to copy the social habits of the bourgeoisie (Behrens 75). After the death of the pompous and autocratic Louis XIV in 1715, it was felt uncool to place so much emphasis on pomp and formality. A more relaxed attitude seemed to be called for. This can be seen in the Rococo art style, so pretty and decorative, and the fashion for drinking coffee, equally popular with nobles and bourgeoisie. Louis XV grew his own coffee beans in a hothouse at Versailles, and even served the coffee himself at his little supper parties – as described here by one of his guests:

 “We were two hours at supper, free and easy but without any excess. Then the King went into the little salon where he made the coffee and poured it out; there were no servants and we helped ourselves” (quoted in Mitford 75).

 Returning to the family in Lancret’s painting, their attachment to domestic, “bourgeois” values is shown by the obvious affection between husband, wife, and children, and by their relaxed habit of drinking coffee in the garden. But they may also have a title of nobility, because the dog seen snuffling among the hollyhocks is probably not a family pet but a hunting dog – and hunting was reserved for the nobility (Tocqueville 288). Severe punishments were given to non-nobles who hunted. Hunting was associated with the ownership of land, something which gave additional social status. We can see similar dogs in a picture by Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755), who specialised in hunt-related paintings depicting guns, dogs, and the piles of birds and animals that had been slaughtered.

Jean-Baptiste Oudry, The Dead Roe, 1721, Wallace Collection, London 

It is curious that hollyhock flowers are depicted in both paintings by Lancret and Oudry - is there a reason for this? It is also worth noting that the servant in Lancret’s painting has the same colours as the dog (brown and white) – emphasising his subordinate status?

Lancret’s painting of a family drinking coffee in their garden was first shown at the Salon exhibition of 1742, the year before Lancret died. A reviewer of this exhibition praised Lancret’s paintings for their “engaging characters . . . lightness of touch in the brushwork . . . variety in the manner of using colours” (quoted in Wine 305). A valuable review, as it tells us the things contemporaries were looking for in a painting. The reviewer referred to Lancret as “Watteau’s rival”, a revealing comment which shows the continuing influence of Watteau, who had died 21 years earlier in 1721.

Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), who is regarded as the greatest artist of the early eighteenth century, was the creator of a new type of picture called a fête galante. In a fête galante we are shown characters in fancy dress, often wearing the costumes of the Italian Commedia dell Arte, romancing in a park-like setting. There is often a musician playing and statues or fountains in the background. Watteau may have  been inspired to create such scenes by the beauty of the parks and gardens in Paris. It appears that Lancret assisted Watteau in his studio for a time, until Watteau dismissed him, probably fearing that Lancret was becoming too much of a rival. In 1719, Lancret was accepted into membership of the official painting Academy as a painter of fêtes galantes.

Watteau’s painting Fétes Venitiennes illustrates some features of his work and his influence on Lancret.

          

Antoine Watteau, Fétes Venitiennes, 1718-19, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 

In Watteau’s Fétes Venitiennes and in Lancret’s painting of the family we see a group of gaily dressed figures in a park or garden. These figures are highlighted against the dark olive-green tones of the background. Both paintings contain a large urn and a fountain discharging water into a round pool, so similar that it is thought Lancret may have copied this feature from Watteau’s picture (Wine 305). Again, both pictures have a backdrop of feathery and insubstantial trees, perhaps using oil paint that has been heavily diluted with turpentine.

The sketchily painted backgrounds seen in both pictures may derive from experience of painting stage sets, since Watteau and Lancret both began their careers working as apprentices, although at different times, to Claude Gillot (1673-1722), who did a lot of work for the theatre as a designer of costumes and scenery. Gillot’s paintings and prints often feature characters from the theatre, and it is from his example that Watteau must have derived inspiration to include Commedia dell Arte figures in his own work. 

It is possible that Lancret copied the poses of the husband and wife drinking coffee in their garden from figures in another Watteau painting, L’Enseigne de Gersaint (Gersaint’s Shop Sign), which Watteau painted to advertise the shop of his friend Edmé Gersaint the art dealer: “the poses of the father and the mother are similar to those of (respectively) the woman leaning on the counter and the vendeuse in Watteau’s work” (Wine 304).

Antoine Watteau, L’ Enseigne de Gersaint (detail), 1721, Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin 

But the resemblance is not close enough to accept this borrowing with any certainty, and it is equally likely that the poses are merely the kind of relaxed, yet graceful postures seen so often in a painting such as this.

A more important point of similarity between the two pictures is that all the figures are dressed in contemporary fashions, not the fancy dress of a fête galante. In L’ Enseigne de Gersaint, Watteau transformed his subject matter by removing his characters from their dreamlike park and placing them in a modern setting. One wonders if Watteau’s art would have continued in this direction, but this is something we will sadly never know, as he suffered from tuberculosis and did not have long to live. In his picture of the family drinking coffee, Lancret modernises and domesticates the fête galante by showing a scene from contemporary life, a family in their garden instead of lovers in a park. The painting is more than just a pretty picture because it offers its viewers a model of family life, gracious living, and politesse, rather as the little girl is being educated to appreciate coffee. 

Works Cited

Behrens, CBA, The Ancien Régime, Thames & Hudson, 1967

Mitford, Nancy, Madame de Pompadour, Vintage, 2011

National Gallery website: www.nationalgallery.org.uk

Tocqueville, Alexis de, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution, Penguin, 2008 (first published in French in1856)

Wine, Humphrey, The Eighteenth-Century French Paintings, National Gallery, 2018