Nicolas Lancret : Île de France or Île de Cythère ?

Nicolas Lancret was an artist who practiced the genre of the fête galante, a genre introduced to popularity by Antoine Watteau. Lancret, however, was not a slavish imitator of Watteau, and introduced various innovations into the genre, innovations that lent his paintings a more pronounced visual impact and an enhanced sense of contemporaneity. Among the most important and unusual of these innovations was Lancret’s insertion of the work of other artists, both realized and drawn, into his images. Lancret did this most often in landscape, where we find fountains and sculptures drawn from the works of others, but he used this technique for interiors too. One of the most striking is his creation of the room for the Fête Galante in a Garden Pavilion (Berlin, Schloss Charlottenbourg), where Lancret adopted the architecture and decoration of the Salon de la Paix of the summer apartments of Anne of Austria, in the Palais du Louvre. The author suggests one inspiration for this technique was the mural decoration of the Trianon de Marbre, at Versailles, specifically the work of painters like Pierre-Denis Martin, who included figures in contemporary dress ambling at leisure through the parkland sculptures of the gardens of Versailles.