A lady and a
gentleman with two girls in a garden (the cup of chocolate): a material culture analysis
Hillary Curtis
I do not
think I ever took so much trouble to please or that I was ever so satisfied
with myself…I was successively youthful and rational, playful and emotional,
sometimes even wanton, and I pleased myself by considering him as a sultan in
the midst of a harem in which I was successively the different favorites – Les
Liaisons Dangereuses, 1782, Cholderlos de Laclos[1]
Choderlos de Laclos wrote these words for the Marquise
de Merteuil in 1782, forty years after Lancret painted his beautiful
picture. But what these words allude to
is the same ‘conspiracy of pleasing’, the same performance of identity,
allusion, self-fashioning and the use of specific tools for this purpose which
is central to the understanding of Lancret’s A lady and a gentleman with two
girls in a garden (the cup of chocolate).[2]
Comparatively little has been written about the works
on Nicolas Lancret. When writing on his
works appears it is most often in connection to his contemporaries. Whether the
parallel being drawn be stylistically or thematically, he is most often raised
on the writer’s journey to elucidating a larger argument about gardens, swings,
Watteau, Fragonard or even images of Madame de Pompadour.[3]
There has been studies that focus on him exclusively but these are limited.[4]
Lancret deserves further consideration in his own right.
Certain motifs and/or elements occur commonly
throughout his images. A certain stylized, inhabited, contrived garden scene
which depicts small groups of young upper bourgeois or aristocratic ladies and
gentlemen dressed in fine, brightly coloured textiles with powered faces and
rouged cheeks, taking part in a social exchanges (singing, dancing, playing
cards, taking hot chocolate, even starting a fire with a mirror: see Figures, 2
-12) often encumbering/occasioning the use of furniture or traditionally
interior decoration such as a card tables, musical instruments or coffee and
chocolate pots. The garden’s similarity
to those depicted on stage are striking and un-missable. The garden in these
paintings occur as a theatrical background to the action that is taking place
downstage.
Recent articles such as Byron Ellsworth Hamann’s ‘Interventions:
the mirrors of Las Meninas: cochineal, silver and clay’ [5]and
Natasha Eaton’s article ‘Nomadism of colour: painting, technology and waste
in the chromo-zones of colonial India c. 1765 – c.1860’ [6]
have demonstrated the fruitfulness of a taking a material culture studies
approach to examining artistic works. Hamann
analysis examines three objects: the silver tray, a small red curarous
that is placed upon it and red/pink cloth visible in mirror that has been dyed
with cochineal. These, he argues are
objects, which are the products of Spanish colonial trade links and Amerindian labor, signify and make present the otherwise
invisibility of their makers and sites of their labor therefore readdressing a Las
Meninas which has previously only examined the painting in terms of
reception and representation in and of the sixteenth century Spanish court. Eaton
conducts much the same endeavor in her own article in which she discusses the
politics of production and consumption of certain colour’s produced in the
subaltern during the colonial period.
Specifically, mummy brown, indigo and Indian yellow, the latter which in
analyses particularly in its relation to and replacement of gold leaf. These allow her to consider hidden (and yet
physically highly visible) ‘layers’ of social historical meaning. By investigating the production of indigo,
for example, which entailed vast land clearing, the usurpation of food crop
land for indigo production land, the conditions of treatment of workers in
which their role transformed from a farm worker to machine like labors, she was
better able to understand the significance of the military uniforms gaol
clothes and art works in which it appears. Eaton’s article uses multiple art
objects to make conjectures about the production and consumption of the
epistemes of culture, place and space. These two articles represent the
anthropological turn. the investigation
into the production and understanding of culture, place and space and space via
the materials and objects that are depicted in and make up the artistic object
and at the same time uncovering new dimensions to the artistic object via this
process. Both prove to be fruitful, Hamann
in particular demonstrating a new presence – that of Amerindian labor – into an
image that has usually only been examined within the context of the sixteenth
century Spanish royal court.
Thus with the dual goal of a better understanding of
both Lancret’s painting, A lady and a gentleman with two girls (the cup of
chocolate) (subsequently to be known as The cup of chocolate) and to
consider the merits of material culture line of inquiry into works of art in
sight, it is that aim of the next few pages to examine the material objects
that are present in The cup of chocolate.
While it may not appear so at first glance the objects
and materials available for study in this painting are numerous and varied; the
child’s doll, the textiles – including those of the servant as well as the
family, the dog, the porcelain, the silver tray, the silver coffee pot, the
vermillion painted cheeks of the mother, the hot beverage being consumed and
indeed even the garden that is after all as highly contrived as a theatrical
backdrop.[7] Not all of these objects and materials will
be looked at here. The following pages
will be limited to the focusing on the coffee (chocolate) pot and its contents;
the vermillion rouge of the mistress; and, finally, the garden space as a
material object; specifically a theatrical backdrop and an extension of the
tools exploited in the fashioning of identity.
The reasons for the latter will become clearer as the analysis of the
first are considered.
[1] Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, Les
Liaisons Dangereuses, 1782, trans. Richard Aldington, London and New York,
2011.
[2] Mimi Hellman term for the complex system of les
bienséances in which individuals had to please others without appearing to
please themselves, but to be pleased by the other’s pleasure at the same time
as displaying a certain amount of reciprocal pleasure at their partners efforts
to do the same. An upmost naturalness
and ease was to be expected during this whole time. Mimi
Hellman, Furniture, ‘Sociability, and the work of leisure in eighteenth century
France’, Eighteenth century studies, Vol.32, No.4 (summer), 1999,
415-445.
[3]
Lancret’s images of ladies at their toilette are often mentioned in studies of
these images. The studies invariably
focus on the numerous works that Boucher completed of this subject, and are
often images of Madame de Pompadour. Lancret is also often cited in studies of
Watteau. See Martin P. Eidelberg, Watteau, Lancret and the fountains of
Oppenort, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 110, No. 785 (august) 1968, 445 – 456
and also Donald Posner, The swinging women of Watteau and Fragonard, The art
bulletin, Vol.64, No.1 (March), 1982, 75-88.
[4] Tavener
Holmes, Mary and Joseph Focarino, Nicolas
Lancret 1690 – 1743, New York in association with the Frick Collection,
1991.;Tavener Holmes, Mary and Mark Leonard, Nicolas Lancret: Dance for a Fountain, Las Angeles, 2006 are two
such examples. There is also a brief
study of his drawings: Margaret Morgan Grasselli, ‘Eleven new drawings by
Nicolas Lancret’, Master drawings, Vol.23/24. No.3 (1985-1986), 377-389 + 467-474.
[5] Byron Ellsworth Hamann’s ‘Interventions: the mirrors
of Las Meninas: cochineal, silver and clay’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 92.
No.1-2. 2010.
[6] Natasha Eaton’s article ‘Nomadism of colour: painting,
technology and waste in the chromo-zones of colonial India c. 1765 – c.1860’, Journal
of Material Culture, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2012. P. 61- 81.
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