NICOLAS LANCRET (PARIS, 1690 – PARIS, 1743) Country Festival Oil on canvas 41.5 x 55 cm. Certificate Galerie Brame & Lorenceau. Publication Work reproduced in Fabienne Charpin-Schaff’s catalogue raisonné, published by the Wildenstein Foundation. A gathering in a park. Whilst an entwined couple strolls slowly at the edge of a wood, a man kneeling on the right beneath the trees declares his love to a young woman sitting there, offering her a bouquet of wildflowers. Behind them, beneath the canopy, two other women: one watching the scene – a chaperone (?) – the other busy picking flowers. A spaniel, indifferent to the action, stands amongst the figures. Amongst the trees, one can make out the silhouette of a large stone vase, suggesting that we are in a park. In the background, behind the first couple, a vast landscape stretches out towards mountains in the distance. The sky is a serene blue. The pastel colours of this scene are also very soft: pinks, yellows and oranges, which appear more saturated in the case of the main couple. The figures, bathed in light, move through an idealised world, an operetta-like countryside characteristic of this pastoral painting intended to decorate small private rooms. Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743) was a French genre painter. Gifted with great talent as a draughtsman, he chose painting over engraving, for which he had been destined. Trained in the studio of Gillot, he became friends with his elder, Antoine Watteau (1684–1720), who influenced both his style and his choice of subjects, encouraging him to paint ‘from life’ outside the studio, creating landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Admitted to the Academy in 1719 with a work entitled *Conversation galante*, now in the Wallace Collection, he specialised in genre scenes and, more specifically, in these ‘fêtes galantes’ – a genre specially devised by the Academy for Watteau. This *Fête champêtre* is one of the many paintings he produced in this pastoral style for the decoration of aristocratic apartments, including those of King Louis XV, such as the series *Quatre saisons*, commissioned for the Château de La Muette and now in the Louvre. His free and joyful painting style reflects the carefree nature of an aristocratic society devoted to the pleasures of gallantry, good food, … and the joys of life. Yet Lancret, although he never left Paris, was also an admirer of the Old Masters, particularly the Dutch, in whose tradition he placed his precisely observed genre scenes. He was also a great lover of the theatre who knew how to assign roles to his painted characters.