When Jean-Baptiste Pater died in 1736, he had completed eight paintings based on the popular fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) which were engraved by Pierre Filloeul (1696–after 1754). Lancret in his turn painted twelve, of which the Museum owns two, this one and its pendant (
2004.86). A third Lancret from the series is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and was exhibited at the Salon of 1738; others belong to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Wallace Collection, London, the Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris, and the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Additional artists contributed to the series of paintings, which were engraved by Nicolas Larmessin (1684–1755), after whom the set of thirty-two prints came to be known as the Larmessin Suite.
La Fontaine attributes the tale illustrated here to the Queen of Navarre. Lancret shows the beginning of the narrative, in which the master of a household seduces a serving girl who has been gathering flowers in his garden, unaware that he is observed by a neighbor (the small figure leaning on the sill of the upstairs window in the top right corner of the picture). When he realizes that the woman is watching him, he abandons the servant and goes off in search of his wife, whom he brings to the garden forthwith and ravishes in turn. When the neighbor reports having seen the husband compromising the maid, his wife responds that it was not the maid but she herself enjoying the pleasures of conjugal life. The little painting has a highly theatrical quality and indeed the story of the servant justified was performed as a play on various occasions in the eighteenth century.
Katharine Baetjer 2013
