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X. Fête champêtre
Entered August 2017

 

Whereabouts unknown

Oil on panel

28 x 23 cm

 

PROVENANCE

Hampstead House, near Bury St. Edmund’s, collection of Mrs. T. G. Booth. Her sale and others, London, Christie’s, June 11, 1926, lot 153: “WATTEAU. . . . FÊTES CHAMPÊTRES—a pair / On panel—11 in. by 9 in.” Bought by Barclay for 11 guineas the pair, according to annotated copies of the sale catalogue in the Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

 

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY  

Ingersoll-Smouse, Pater (1928), cat 25-26, 228-29.

 

REMARKS

 

Why Mrs. Booth’s painting should have been attributed to Watteau is curious, since it is obviously related to several paintings by Pater and his school. The same pair of dancers and the plinth topped by a ball appear in a well-known Pater painting in the Wallace Collection. Similar elements can be found in other Pater paintings, such as one in Sanssouci. Not only is the Booth painting not by Watteau, but also it is not by Pater. Rather, as its left-right orientation shows, it is by a copyist working from the 1739 print by Pierre Filloeul   

Although Mrs. Booth’s second painting was not illustrated in the 1926 sale catalogue, it is likely that it too was after a Pater composition, perhaps the Filloeul engraving of Le Concert amoureux, the pendant painting to La Danse and alsoin the Wallace Collection.

 

 

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