La bergère endormie (The sleeping shepherdess)

In Nicolas Lancret’s small jewel of a painting, a young shepherdess has fallen asleep beneath a sheltering tree. A handsome boy reaches over her slumbering form to playfully slip the crook from her hand without awakening her. Another young man, dressed in salmon-pink theatrical costume and a blue beribboned straw hat, raises a finger to warn the young prankster to act slowly and in silence so as to not awaken the girl. An amused couple, also in theatrical costume – his arm around her shoulders – watch from behind the tree as the innocent trick plays out. The theme of adolescents or young adults playing at children’s games was a favorite of the artist: some of the games he depicted remain commonplace today – hide-and-seek, blindman’s buff, see-sawing, cards-playing – others, such as ‘pied-de-boeuf’, have fallen into obscurity. While Lancret looked to 17th-century French and Netherlandish prints as visual models for his depictions of games-playing – as would Chardin and Fragonard, two French painters of the next generations who also frequently depicted such subjects – he transformed those dry sources into seductive images by means of elegant costuming, fluent brushwork and rich and vibrant coloring. The games he depicted were chosen, as Mary Tavener Holmes has observed, because they offered the 'potential for flirtation'. As she notes, the adolescents “playing these games are mimicking the courtship activities of adults' and, on the edge of adulthood, 'explore their future in the harmless flirtation of an innocent game' (op.cit.). In Lancret’s painting La Malice (or ‘Mischief’, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), a young girl who has fallen asleep over her open schoolbook is teased by a boy who blows smoke in her face through a long pipe; in The Toy Windmill (National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh), a girl puffs on a pinwheel to no avail to make it spin, as the boy who is her laughing companion has tampered with it to tease her.

While never a formal pupil of Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), the older master mentored Lancret, who early took up Watteau’s new genre, the fête galante. In fact, Lancret was only the second artist – following Watteau – to be accepted into the Académie Royale as a painter of fêtes galantes, in 1719. The Aitken painting demonstrates how closely Lancret would adhere to Watteau’s new genre, as well as the ways in which it evolved in his hands to reflect his own artistic personality. The verdant garden setting, flirtatious couples, and characters dressed in the costumes of the Commedia dell’Arte all find their origins in Watteau’s paintings, but Lancret introduces a lighter, brighter palette of colors and a greater attention to a more detailed and naturalistic rendering of trees and foliage, the fall of light through the leaves, and enveloping atmosphere than did his teacher. Furthermore, Lancret’s protagonists evince a more innocent playfulness in their flirtation than Watteau’s more erotically mature and psychologically complex couples. The central motif of the sleeping maiden and teasing boy never appears in Watteau’s oeuvre, but reappears with some frequency in Lancret's, notably in canvases in the Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris and the Royal Palace in Berlin. Indeed, the sleeping shepherdess is found in another painting by Lancret in the Aitken collection, where she is in almost identical pose, crook in hand, in the painting of Summer in the series of four large panels illustrating The Four Seasons. (Lancret would have established the pose in a life-study drawing, now lost, that he kept in his studio for ongoing reference). A fine figure study drawn in trois crayons for the seated comedian in pink costume appears on a sheet of two studies of male figures in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (inv. no. 97.GB.31), which acquired it in 1997. The distinctive facial types in the Aitken panel are highly characteristic of Lancret’s art and serve as a virtual signature throughout his career, but the exceptional attention to detail and atmospherics, the notable concentration of the small but compact composition, and the exceptionally vivid colors and sensuous handling of paint permit us to date the painting to circa 1730, as suggested by Joseph Baillio (op. cit.) and confirmed by Mary Tavener Holmes (on first-hand inspection).

Given that the earliest recorded owner of this picture is the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, whose illustrious career was spent mainly in politics and government service, there remains a strong possibility that it could have been acquired earlier in the 19th century by his maternal grandmother Margaret, Baroness Keith and Nairne (1788-1867) and her husband Auguste-Charles-Joseph, comte de Flahaut de la Billarderie (1785-1870), an important diplomat and natural son of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince of Talleyrand (1754-1838). The Flahauts married in 1817 and spent fifty years together during which they maintained houses of considerable grandeur in Paris, London, Vienna and Scotland and amassed a superb collection of French furniture and paintings. Their daughter Emily married the 4th Marquess of Lansdowne in 1843, and, following the death of Lady Keith in 1867, much of the collection was divided between Emily and her sister Georgina. It could have been as a result of this division that the 5th Marquess inherited this painting. Its subsequent history was equally illustrious, it was later sold through the London dealers Agnew's to Alfred Charles de Rothschild (1842-1918) by 1884. It was next acquired by Edward Cecil Guinness (1876-1949), later 1st Earl of Iveagh; passed by inheritance to his son, The Honorable Arthur Earnest Guinness (1876-1949); by descent to his daughter, The Hon. Mrs. Brinsley Sheridan Bushe Plunket, from whom it was again purchased by Agnew in 1971 and sold by the firm to Jaime Ortiz-Patiño. The painting was acquired at the historic Patino auction at Sotheby’s in 1992 by Wildenstein & Co., New York and acquired from the firm in 2006 by Irene Roosevelt Aitken.

We are grateful to Mary Tavener Holmes for her assistance and for endorsing the attribution of the painting to Lancret.