The Embarkation for Cythera

The Embarkation for Cythera - Huile sur toile signée

Lot n° 32
261,6cmx249,3cm

Signed and dated 1775 and perhaps depicting ‘The Embarkation to Cythera’, the present painting is one of Le Prince’s largest canvases and was coupled – until the Lockett Agnew sale at Christie’s in 1949 – with a pendant, depicting Harvesting Fields (see the exhibition, France in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1968, no. 435). Madame Adélaïde, daughter of Louis XV, owned a painting by Le Prince of a comparable subject that was exhibited at the Salon of 1775 under the title Des voyageurs attendent le bac; however, discrepancies in the recorded dimensions of that painting preclude us from identifying it with the present lot with certainty. Although the present composition, with its young couples setting off for the boat that will carry them to the Isle of Love, pays obvious homage to the fêtes galantes of Watteau, Lancret and Pater from a half-century earlier, its closest comparison is to the large fête decorations of Fragonard, such as The Progress of Love series in the The Frick Collection, The Fête at St. Cloud (Banque de France, Paris) and The Swing and Blindman’s Buff(figs. 1 and 2; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). These large-scale decorations in which small figures in opulent ‘fancy’ dress flirt and make music in towering parkland settings also date to the early and mid-1770s. But unlike Fragonard, Le Prince brings to this elegant, decorative genre a Flemish palette and landscape manner inflected with memories of 17th-century Dutch painters such as Allart van Everdingen, whose works were included in Le Prince’s own art collection.