The Visit (Le visite à la gardien)
1779
34 3/4 x 50 3/4 in. (88.3 x 128.9 cm)
Jean-Baptiste Le Prince
France
(Metz, 1734 - 1781, Saint-Denis)
Object Type:
Painting
Medium and Support:
Oil on canvas
Credit Line:
Marion Stratton Gould Fund; and Mr. and Mrs. E. Lewis Burnham, Edith Holden Babcock Bequest, and Bertha Buswell Bequest, by exchange
Accession Number:
1977.102
Location: Currently on view
Le Prince studied with the rococo painter François Boucher and adopted his master's delicate manner and cool, pastel palette in his early work. Dating from late in his career, however, "The Visit" demonstrates a greater naturalism, reflecting the increasing popularity of seventeenth-century Dutch painting in eighteenth-century France. In this canvas, Le Prince has combined a genre scene with a panoramic landscape to suggest a gracious moment in everyday rural life. The subject of nobles visiting a peasant family would have appealed to the sense of humanity cultivated during the Enlightenment.
[Gallery label text, 2008]