Picnic after the Hunt

Nicolas Lancret

National Gallery of Art

Seven elegantly dressed men and women sit and stand together in a landscape while being attended to by more men, who also tend to four dogs and four horses, in this horizontal painting. The people all have pale skin with flushed cheeks and delicate features. They gather in front of a grove of towering trees, the canopies of which reach the top edge of the painting and fill much of the sky in the top half of the composition. In front of the trees, one woman sits and one stands at the center of the painting. To our left of center, the seated woman wears a muted, lemon-yellow dress trimmed with white. The bodice has a high neck and a narrow waist, and her outer yellow jacket is unbuttoned. She wears a small black tricorn hat perched on gray curls. She sits with her body facing us, but she turns to look at a man to our left with big eyes. She reaches out with one hand to take a teacup topped with froth from a tray that man holds. He sits and leans his torso toward the woman, looking at her in profile. His coat is sapphire blue edged with gold. His and the other men’s hair curl around their ears and are tied at the nape of their necks with black ribbons. The other woman stands next to the first, to our right. Her hoop skirt and jacket are scarlet red over a shimmering, ice-blue bodice. Her body angles to our right, and she looks off in that direction in profile. Her brown hair is pulled up under a black cap topped with a red feather. She holds her skirts with her left hand, to our right. A man standing slightly behind her and to our left holds out a loose fist, and she rests her other hand on his. This man wears a fawn-brown coat over an ultramarine-blue waistcoat. He pins a black, gold-edged hat under one arm and looks at the back of the woman’s head. Two more people sit on the ground in front of these couples. A person to our left sitting facing away from us has brown hair and wears a blue jacket. One hand is planted on the hip and the other holds a black hat by the ground. The other is a man who faces us as he leans on one elbow. He wears a dark yellow jacket, and a black hat hides his eyes. He holds out a piece of food to the four dogs in the lower right corner of the painting. One dog strains forward to smell it. Another sniffs the ground, one looks at us, and the fourth looks back at the man holding the dogs’ leashes. Three men tend to three brown horses just beyond this. To our left, a man wearing burnt orange holds a bowl of peach-colored fruit near the left-most couple. A man behind him kneels and pours liquid from a pouch into a decanter. Two baskets are on the ground next to that man and another basket is slung over the back of a gray horse behind him. Grass and leafy vegetation grows to either side of the grouping. Green hills roll back to distant, hazy blue mountains along the horizon, which comes halfway up this composition. Puffy white and gray clouds swirl in the powder-blue sky above.