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拍品专文
The Aitken Four Seasons form a suite of large arabesque panels that, according to tradition, were commissioned by a member of the family of Louis, Duc de Melun (1694-1724), Prince d’Epinoy and Duc de Joyese, to decorate a room in the Hôtel de la Place Royale, Paris, a residence at 28, Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), owned by the Ducs de Melun from at least 1721 until 1763. Subsequently purchased in 1763 by Pierre-Nicolas Caulet d’Hauteville (d.1775), the house passed from his family, presumably through marriage, to the family of the Vicomtes Le Sellier de Chézelles. When the property was again sold in 1826, the decorative ensemble– which included five other arabesque panels by Lancret of nearly identical size and format to The Four Seasons– was removed from the building and stored in the home of the Vicomte Pierre de Chézelles, the château du Boulleaume, Oise, before being sold off at the beginning of the 20th century. The complete ensemble of nine panels was purchased by the dealer Joseph Duveen in 1926, divided into two groups, and dispersed. The Four Seasons were purchased shortly thereafter from Duveen by Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845-1934) for his Paris residence; subsequently entering the collection of Deane Johnson (1918-1999), Beverly Hills; before being purchased at auction in 1972 by Russell and Annie-Laurie Aitken. The five remaining panels, depicting adolescent boys and girls engaging in various pastoral amusements, were sold to Commodore and Mrs. Louis Dudley Beaumont, Cap d’Antibes, circa 1935-36, who gifted them to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1948 (fig 1; inv. no. 1948.176).
The Four Seasons, as well as the five panels now in Cleveland, were likely intended for a garden salon, as Mary Tavener Holmes has noted, where their enveloping landscapes and pastoral themes would harmonize with actual garden views visible through large windows between which the paintings would have been installed. As was the fashion in Régence Paris, the panels would have been inset into elaborate carved and gilded boiserie woodwork – perhaps heightened with mirrors – and their bright palette, white backgrounds, and delicate ornamental surrounds would have created a decor of remarkably light and airy effect.
This style of room decoration was popularized in the first decades of the 18th century by Claude III Audran (1658-1740), a prominent decorative painter and designer who headed a team of guilders, sculptors and painters who ornamented the interiors of private and royal residences. Sometime around 1705-1709, Audran employed Antoine Watteau to join his equipe to paint the figures that filled the arabesques and other decorative compositions executed by painters specializing in ornamental tracery. Lancret would follow in the steps of Watteau, his most influential mentor, and undertook several such large-scale decorative ensembles the 1720s and early 1730s, very likely working, as Watteau did, in part of Audran’s team. As fashions in interior design changed, most of these rooms were dismantled and destroyed, and few remnants of them survive. In addition to the present Four Seasons and their Cleveland companions– which live on without the architecture for which they were created– one complete salon painted by Lancret and Audran’s workshop for Jean de Boullongne, Controller General of Finances under Louis XV, is preserved intact and today installed in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris. Only two small, modest arabesque panels by Watteau survive from his time with Audran: The Faun (or Bacchus) and The Cajoler (both, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes) were made for the hôtel of the Marquis de Nointel circa 1708, and they clearly demonstrate the crucial impact of Watteau and Audran on Lancret’s achievement in the genre. Against plain white backgrounds, Watteau painted delicately brushed, brightly colored images of rustic couples engaged in pastoral amusements, framed by enveloping trees and naturalistic landscape settings, and placed within ornamental tracery composed of flowers, leaves, tendrils and chirping birds. Lancret would adopt all the same elements, but scale them up and develop them into larger and more complete genre scenes that are skillfully and ingeniously integrated into the natural and abstract forms of Audran’s tracery.
In The Four Seasons, Lancret personifies each season with charming adolescents, engaging in activities appropriate to the specific time of year. In Spring, a young maiden displays a wooden birdcage, its door open and former avian occupant released. Empty birdcages were a favored motif in Lancret’s art and– referring back to the Northern print tradition of the 17th century– a widely recognized symbol of lost innocence. The girl’s attentive young companion appears a bit surprised by the sight of the open cage and her eager glance, but his ready flute suggests he understands its meaning. It is Spring, when a young man’s (and woman’s) attention turns to love, and the happy nest of chicks crowning the painting’s ornamental surround alludes to love’s natural consequence. In Summer, a shepherdess naps beneath the branches of a sheltering tree. As she dozes, a young shepherd creeps up behind her to playfully snatch the crook from her hand. Although they represent rustic types, the boy and girl are both dressed in elegant pink and blue silk and satin costumes and straw hats, alluding more to the popular pastorales of the comic theatre than to any realities of agricultural labor. Beside the young couple is a bound bushel of wheat, the seasonal crop traditionally associated with the summer harvest. In Autumn, a handsome young man, tall and upright in his red hunting jacket, is about to call the hunt with his round, brass horn; beneath trees that are beginning to shed their leaves, two young women approach the hunter admiringly. In Winter, Lancret gives us two little boys as they prepare to play a game of leap-frog underneath the bare tree branches of an icy, snow-laden wood. Surrounding and framing each of Lancret’s scenes are delicate ornamental tracery which mixes abstract and naturalistic imagery appropriate to the scene and season, with a particular emphasis on the birds that are symbolically associated with each. Spring is adorned with a nest of hungry baby finches, being nurtured by two jays; Summer is surmounted by affectionate turtle-doves circling the air as they head toward one another, with other doves observing them discreetly from at each corner; Autumn is guarded by a hooded falcon readied for the hunt, with two smaller hawks awaiting nearby; Winter is overseen by a stately swan and two mallards. This tracery – including the birds – would almost certainly have been painted by specialists in Audran’s workshop, designed to augment Lancret’s central scenes and create a unified and harmonious decorative effect for the garden salon for which they were created. Indeed, a close comparison of the tracery in Lancret’s Seasons and Watteau’s small panels made for Nointel demonstrates that these decorative surrounds were all produced by members of Audran’s talented workshop, following the master’s intricate designs.
While it is not possible to precisely date Lancret’s Four Seasons, in style they closely match the artist’s surviving decorations for the Hôtel de Boullongne, which are known to date from between 1728 and 1731. Lancret’s grand and theatrical conception of landscape in the Aitken panels, the scale and amplitude of his figures, the ease of the seemingly effortless compositions, the richness and variety of the artist’s palette and sophisticated interplay of dappled sunlight and sheltering shade all indicate that these marvelous panels are mature works executed around 1730, when Lancret was working at the height of his popularity and the peak of his form.
We are grateful to Dr. Mary Tavener Holmes for examining the paintings firsthand and endorsing their attribution to Lancret.
The Four Seasons, as well as the five panels now in Cleveland, were likely intended for a garden salon, as Mary Tavener Holmes has noted, where their enveloping landscapes and pastoral themes would harmonize with actual garden views visible through large windows between which the paintings would have been installed. As was the fashion in Régence Paris, the panels would have been inset into elaborate carved and gilded boiserie woodwork – perhaps heightened with mirrors – and their bright palette, white backgrounds, and delicate ornamental surrounds would have created a decor of remarkably light and airy effect.
This style of room decoration was popularized in the first decades of the 18th century by Claude III Audran (1658-1740), a prominent decorative painter and designer who headed a team of guilders, sculptors and painters who ornamented the interiors of private and royal residences. Sometime around 1705-1709, Audran employed Antoine Watteau to join his equipe to paint the figures that filled the arabesques and other decorative compositions executed by painters specializing in ornamental tracery. Lancret would follow in the steps of Watteau, his most influential mentor, and undertook several such large-scale decorative ensembles the 1720s and early 1730s, very likely working, as Watteau did, in part of Audran’s team. As fashions in interior design changed, most of these rooms were dismantled and destroyed, and few remnants of them survive. In addition to the present Four Seasons and their Cleveland companions– which live on without the architecture for which they were created– one complete salon painted by Lancret and Audran’s workshop for Jean de Boullongne, Controller General of Finances under Louis XV, is preserved intact and today installed in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris. Only two small, modest arabesque panels by Watteau survive from his time with Audran: The Faun (or Bacchus) and The Cajoler (both, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Valenciennes) were made for the hôtel of the Marquis de Nointel circa 1708, and they clearly demonstrate the crucial impact of Watteau and Audran on Lancret’s achievement in the genre. Against plain white backgrounds, Watteau painted delicately brushed, brightly colored images of rustic couples engaged in pastoral amusements, framed by enveloping trees and naturalistic landscape settings, and placed within ornamental tracery composed of flowers, leaves, tendrils and chirping birds. Lancret would adopt all the same elements, but scale them up and develop them into larger and more complete genre scenes that are skillfully and ingeniously integrated into the natural and abstract forms of Audran’s tracery.
In The Four Seasons, Lancret personifies each season with charming adolescents, engaging in activities appropriate to the specific time of year. In Spring, a young maiden displays a wooden birdcage, its door open and former avian occupant released. Empty birdcages were a favored motif in Lancret’s art and– referring back to the Northern print tradition of the 17th century– a widely recognized symbol of lost innocence. The girl’s attentive young companion appears a bit surprised by the sight of the open cage and her eager glance, but his ready flute suggests he understands its meaning. It is Spring, when a young man’s (and woman’s) attention turns to love, and the happy nest of chicks crowning the painting’s ornamental surround alludes to love’s natural consequence. In Summer, a shepherdess naps beneath the branches of a sheltering tree. As she dozes, a young shepherd creeps up behind her to playfully snatch the crook from her hand. Although they represent rustic types, the boy and girl are both dressed in elegant pink and blue silk and satin costumes and straw hats, alluding more to the popular pastorales of the comic theatre than to any realities of agricultural labor. Beside the young couple is a bound bushel of wheat, the seasonal crop traditionally associated with the summer harvest. In Autumn, a handsome young man, tall and upright in his red hunting jacket, is about to call the hunt with his round, brass horn; beneath trees that are beginning to shed their leaves, two young women approach the hunter admiringly. In Winter, Lancret gives us two little boys as they prepare to play a game of leap-frog underneath the bare tree branches of an icy, snow-laden wood. Surrounding and framing each of Lancret’s scenes are delicate ornamental tracery which mixes abstract and naturalistic imagery appropriate to the scene and season, with a particular emphasis on the birds that are symbolically associated with each. Spring is adorned with a nest of hungry baby finches, being nurtured by two jays; Summer is surmounted by affectionate turtle-doves circling the air as they head toward one another, with other doves observing them discreetly from at each corner; Autumn is guarded by a hooded falcon readied for the hunt, with two smaller hawks awaiting nearby; Winter is overseen by a stately swan and two mallards. This tracery – including the birds – would almost certainly have been painted by specialists in Audran’s workshop, designed to augment Lancret’s central scenes and create a unified and harmonious decorative effect for the garden salon for which they were created. Indeed, a close comparison of the tracery in Lancret’s Seasons and Watteau’s small panels made for Nointel demonstrates that these decorative surrounds were all produced by members of Audran’s talented workshop, following the master’s intricate designs.
While it is not possible to precisely date Lancret’s Four Seasons, in style they closely match the artist’s surviving decorations for the Hôtel de Boullongne, which are known to date from between 1728 and 1731. Lancret’s grand and theatrical conception of landscape in the Aitken panels, the scale and amplitude of his figures, the ease of the seemingly effortless compositions, the richness and variety of the artist’s palette and sophisticated interplay of dappled sunlight and sheltering shade all indicate that these marvelous panels are mature works executed around 1730, when Lancret was working at the height of his popularity and the peak of his form.
We are grateful to Dr. Mary Tavener Holmes for examining the paintings firsthand and endorsing their attribution to Lancret.