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| Brother Philippe's Geese |
Artist:Nicolas Lancret (French, Paris 1690–1743 Paris)
Date:ca. 1736
Medium:Oil on copper
Dimensions:10 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. (27.3 x 35.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Purchase, Walter and Leonore Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 2004
Accession Number:2004.86
The fable, told by La Fontaine, begins with Philippe, who, in dedication to God, retired to a mountain cave where his son grew up free from temptation. When, at age twenty, the youth emerged, Philippe truthfully explained to him all that he saw until they came to a party of young women. "What is that?" asked the youth. "A party of geese," his father replied. "Father, I beg you, let us take one [with us]." The umbrella casts delicate shadows on the women, while the young man's response leaves little to doubt.
Catalogue Entry
Lancret lived in Paris throughout his uneventful, productive, and successful career. He was apprenticed first to an unnamed engraver and then to a minor history painter before enrolling no later than 1708 in the school of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. His principal biographer reports that as he wished to work in the genre popularized by Watteau, he joined the atelier of Claude Gillot (1673–1722), who had been Watteau’s teacher. Lancret’s preliminary admission to the Académie dates to 1718 and he became a full academician in 1719, upon presentation of a Conversation Galante (Wallace Collection, London). After Watteau’s death in 1721 Lancret, together with Jean-Baptiste Pater (1695–1736), took his place. Lancret exhibited several times in the 1720s and regularly from the time the Salon was reestablished in 1737.
The two pictures (see also 2004.85) by Lancret belonging to the Metropolitan Museum are a pair and form part of a much larger group illustrating the fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695), so popular in the eighteenth century. They are small in scale and painted on copper. This one, displaying a softer and more delicate range of tones, illustrates the concluding moment of a tale first told by the Italian poet Boccaccio (1313–1375). Filippo, or Philippe, having lost his young wife, took his son to live, free from sin, in a cave in the mountains. Only when he reached eighteen did his father expose the youth to the outside world and there he soon came upon a party of young woman. When he asked his father to identify these beautiful creatures, his father replied that they were a party of geese. "Oh, agreeable goose, sing that I might hear your voice," the son cried out in delight. "Father, I beg you, let us take one [with us]."
Katharine Baetjer 2012
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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