Fête champêtre

A fête champêtre was a form of

Such events became a popular subject in French 18th-century painting, representing a glamourized aristocratic form of pastoral, with "scenes of well dressed dalliance in a park setting".^[1]

In art

Antoine Watteau invented the genre, from around 1710, and is its best exponent, imitated by others such as Nicolas Lancret and Jean-Baptiste Pater. In 1717 the French Academy expanded its categories of painting to include what it termed the fête galante especially for Watteau's reception piece The Embarkation for Cythera, now in the Louvre. Watteau's examples "have a quality of restraint, of unexpressed melancholy" which is absent in those by others.^[2] His paintings often include characters from the commedia dell'arte, a taste he acquired from his master, Claude Gillot.

When music is being made, as it often is, Concert champêtre or Pastoral Concert may be used as a title. The genre in painting "died a quiet death" in the early 1740s,^[3] though arguably living on in the form of porcelain figure groups for the rest of the century.

Other periods

The "Garden of Love" was a genre of medieval subjects in illuminated manuscripts, carved ivory, tapestry, and murals.^[4]

A painting dated to ca. 1509 now usually called Le Concert champêtre or the Pastoral Concert was named Fête champêtre when it entered the collection of the Louvre in 1792. It has been attributed to Giorgione, Titian, and Sebastiano del Piombo,^[5] but is now usually given to Titian. The meaning of the painting continues to be discussed by art historians.

The genre of the

Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) – originally titled Le Bain (The Bath) – by Édouard Manet (1862–3), represents a late variant of the genre, as does Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) by Georges Seurat (1884–6).^[6]

Notes