Brother Philippe's Geese

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

Rodolphe Kann, Paris (by 1900–d. 1905; his estate, 1905–7; cat., 1907, vol. 2, no. 150; sold to Duveen); [Duveen, Paris, 1907–17; sold to Michelham]; Herbert Stern, 1st Baron Michelham, Paris (1917–d. 1919); Captain Alfred Löwenstein (or Loewenstein), London and Brussels (until d. 1928); ?Madame Alfred (Madeleine Misonne) Löwenstein (or Loewenstein), Brussels (from 1928); [Matthiesen, London, until 1950; sold to Ortiz-Linares]; Graziella Patino de Ortiz-Linares, wife of the Bolivian Ambassador to France, Paris (from 1950); her son, George Ortiz, Geneva (until 2004; consigned to Stair Sainty Matthiesen); [Stair Sainty Matthiesen, New York, 2004; sold to The Met]

Art Gallery of the Corporation of London. "Selection of Works by French and English Painters of the Eighteenth Century," April 22–July 26, 1902, no. 31 (as "Les oies du Frère Phillip [The Geese of Brother Phillip]," lent by Rudolphe Kann).

Anatole de Montaiglon. Procès-verbaux de l'Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 1648–1793. Vol. 5, Paris, 1883, pp. 192–93, under the year 1737, records Larmessin's gift to the Academy of his engraving after this painting.

Wilhelm [von] Bode. Gemäldesammlung des Herrn Rudolf Kann in Paris. Vienna, 1900, p. VI, pl. 96, as "Les Oies de frère Philippe," on copper, 27.5 x 35.5 cm, by Lancret, as a pendant to "La servante justifiée" (no. 95).

Wilhelm [von] Bode. Gemälde-Sammlung des Herrn Rudolf Kann in Paris. Vienna, 1900, p. XXXII, ill. (gallery photograph).

Catalogue of the Rodolphe Kann Collection: Pictures. Paris, 1907, vol. 2, p. 60, no. 150, ill. opp. p. 60, as Father Philippe's Geese.

Georges Wildenstein. Lancret. Paris, 1924, p. 114, no. 658, fig. 164, as the primary version of Les oies du Frère Philippe.

Jean-Pierre Collinet, ed. La Fontaine: Œuvres complètes. Vol. 1, La Fontaine et ses illustrateurs. [Paris], 1999, p. CXXXI, while static, such compositions are elegant and refined, inflected by the fête galante.

Miriam Raffaella Gaudio. Monografia di Nicolas Lancret (1690–1743). Turin, 2009, p. 45, fig. 16 (color), draws attention to the theatrical qualities of the picture.

Christoph Martin Vogtherr et al. Französische Gemälde. Vol. 1, Watteau, Pater, Lancret, Lajoüe. Berlin, 2011, p. 688, indicate that Larmessin's reproductive engraving was completed by 1737.

Katharine Baetjer. French Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Early Eighteenth Century through the Revolution. New York, 2019, pp. 97–103, no. 22, ill. (color).

For the fable (Les oies de Frère Philippe / Nouvelle tirée de Boccace) see La Fontaine: Œuvres complètes, Jean-Pierre Collinet, ed., Gallimard, Paris, 1999, 2 vols., vol. 2, pp. 701–5 (Contes et nouvelles en vers. Troisième partie).

The painting was engraved in reverse by Nicolas de Larmessin (1684–1755).