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| The Fair at Bezons |
Artist:Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater (French, Valenciennes 1695–1736 Paris)
Date:ca. 1733
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:42 x 56 in. (106.7 x 142.2 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:The Jules Bache Collection, 1949
The picture, Pater's masterpiece, dates to the early 1730s, preceding a smaller 1733 version at Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam. The popular fair, held outside Paris each year on the first Sunday in September, inspired a stage play, a ballet-pantomime, and several works of art. Drawing from the imagery of Watteau’s fêtes galantes, Pater chose a bucolic landscape. People from all classes of society enjoy the festivities. The principal dancer may be Mademoiselle d'Angeville, a famous actress. Behind her is Pierrot, in white suit and ruff, and, on stage, a costumed monkey performs.
Catalogue Entry
Pater, born in Valenciennes, was apprenticed to a local painter in 1706. A contemporary would later report that his father sent him to Paris to study with Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721): probably the two painters left Valenciennes together in late 1709 or 1710. After they separated, Pater was probably unable to make a living on his own, and returned to his native town. In 1716 he fell afoul of the local guild because, although he was not a member, he was working as an artist in Valenciennes and his father was selling his pictures. He decamped to Paris in 1718 for the rest of his life. Pater, like Watteau from a Flemish cultural milieu, lived an austere existence and died young. He too was received into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1728 as a painter of fêtes galantes, the genre invented for Watteau. Pater worked tirelessly and with facility, fearing failure, even though his patrons included Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786).
The Fair at Bezons is one of Pater's largest, most important, and complex paintings. The composition, inspired by Watteau, comprises an open landscape in which numerous small figures eat and drink, play music and dance, and watch various forms of mostly comic entertainment, against a background of trees and idealized ruined buildings. The setting does not pretend to be a real place. (Bezons was a small village on the Seine to the northwest of Paris. The picture was first identified with this eighteenth-century country fair venue in 1793, some sixty years after it was painted). The principal dancer, who wears a yellow dress with a peach-colored overskirt tied up with blue ribbons, has been identified as the actress Marie Anne Botot d'Angeville (1714–1796), whose portrait by Pater is presumed lost but had been engraved in 1731.
Katharine Baetjer 2010
Copyright Image
https://images.metmuseum.org
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