Fête Champêtre

Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater

National Gallery of Art

Six women, four men, two children, and a dog sit or stand in a loose line close to us in a misty forest setting in this horizontal landscape painting. Painted in muted and hazy tones of mossy green and earthy brown, a copse of trees takes up the left two-thirds of the composition. A fountain or sculpture about twice the height of the people nestles in the copse. On it a mostly nude woman and child sit next to an object, perhaps a fish or urn, on an arched structure lined with sweeping, curving sides. The people all have pale skin, rosy cheeks, blond or brown hair, and delicate features. The men are clean-shaven, and the women have bow-shaped mouths. The men wear suits and capes and the women long dresses with voluminous skirts in shades of copper brown, shell or dark pink, twilight blue, or parchment white. A man and woman sit together in the lower left corner of the painting, and the woman looks out at us and smiles. Slightly farther back, a man places a crown of flowers on a seated woman, who looks at a companion sitting beside her with flowers held in the apron across her lap. A man and woman embrace to the right of this trio. Next, a woman partially opens a fan and looks down at the man next to her, who kneels and leans forward onto a rock. Two children wearing long garments play with a spindly-legged, shorthaired dog in front of this group, and another couple stands in the lower right corner. That woman wears a black gown, holds a closed fan, and looks off to our left. The man behind her, wearing a red floppy cap and cape over a tawny-brown suit with a wide, lacy collar, looks over her shoulder. The grassy clearing stretches back along the right third of the composition and leads to at least nine more people sitting and standing in the distance. Another copse of trees and far-distant mountains are painted with blended strokes, giving the scene a soft appearance. A few pink-streaked clouds are over the horizon, and smoky blue and white clouds stretch across the lapis-blue sky.