Jean-Baptiste Pater, The Garden Party (Fête Champêtre), 1725–30

Jean-Baptiste Pater is one of the more enigmatic painters of the early eighteenth century. Often overshadowed by his teacher Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), he has historically been dismissed as a painter whose work lacked originality and adhered too closely to his master’s example. Yet two paintings by Pater in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art—The Garden Party (Fête Champêtre) and The Bathers (cat. 327)—invite a reassessment. Painted around 1725–30, these works capture a critical juncture in Pater’s brief career when he moved from Watteau’s visual lexicon of elegant leisure toward more erotically charged subjects. Although the two paintings are often considered pendants due to their nearly identical dimensions and shared provenance since at least 1889, they diverge sharply in subject, tone, and paint handling. Taken together, they offer a compelling window into the tension between civility and sensuality in Pater’s oeuvre, while exemplifying how his reuse of motifs and passages reflects a pragmatic, commercially savvy response to market demands—one that aligns with broader eighteenth-century practices of recombination and replication.¹

Pater was Watteau’s only documented pupil.² Both artists hailed from Valenciennes, and Pater likely first encountered Watteau around 1710. A short-lived apprenticeship ended in a falling out, prompting Pater to return to Valenciennes before reestablishing himself in Paris by 1718, where he worked for, among others, Watteau’s dealer Edme-François Gersaint. In the final months of Watteau’s life, the two reconciled, and Pater later acknowledged that the brief time spent with his mentor had a formative impact on his artistic development. After Watteau’s death in 1721, Pater devoted himself to supplying fêtes galantes—idealized visions of courtly leisure or amorous play—to meet a market eager for the genre. He was agréé (agreed, or admitted) by the Académie Royale in 1725 and reçu (received) in 1728 as a painter of fêtes galantes with his painting Soldier’s Merrymaking (Musée du Louvre), one of the few firmly datable works in his oeuvre.³ By 1729, he was living on the rue Quincampoix, where he remained until his death at age forty on July 25, 1736.

The Garden Party exemplifies Pater’s engagement with the fête galante tradition pioneered by Watteau. Set in a clearing on the wooded edge of a park, the painting depicts elegantly dressed couples reclining, conversing, and exchanging flirtatious glances as they enjoy refreshments. Some lean toward one another and others feign resistance, while children play at their feet. The verdant setting, the rhythmic grouping of figures, and several specific motifs—including the African servant, the seated man with his knees apart, and the child viewed from behind—quote directly from Watteau’s visual vocabulary.⁴ The couple at far left, dressed in seventeenth-century Flemish attire, show that, like Watteau, Pater also drew inspiration from Flemish art, notably the work of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640).⁵ Here, Pater also calls on his own repertoire: the small dog at lower right and the woman in the green dress with a pink mantel are lifted directly from a version of his L’Amour et le badinage (Love and Flirting), their pose and placement nearly unchanged (Fig. 1). Here, such borrowings work not as static quotations but as flexible building blocks within a staged social performance.⁶

Costume amplifies this theatricality. The women are clothed in fashionable silk gowns of the period, while the men wear pseudo-historical or masquerade garments evocative of the Comédie-Italienne. This shift between contemporary and theatrical dress, inherited from Watteau, heightens the sense of artifice and frames the scene as a carefully choreographed fantasy. The sculpture of a reclining female nude, presiding over the assembly from atop a monumental urn, could evoke the mythic presence of Venus, representing the idea of sensual love, in contrast to the more civilized amorous interactions taking place below.⁷ However, Christoph Vogtherr has suggested that this motif may belong more squarely to the ornamental print tradition of early eighteenth-century France, where nymphs and urns symbolized natural abundance.⁸ Such figures appear frequently in the “arabesque” and “grotesque” designs of Jean Bérain the Elder (1640–1711) and Claude Audran III (1658–1734) (Fig. 2), which circulated widely among decorative artists and painters.

Pater’s link to this ornamental tradition was more than incidental. Like Watteau, Pater also worked in Audran’s workshop, supplying both arabesque decoration and figure designs.⁹ The younger artist absorbed a visual system in which motifs could migrate fluidly between fine and decorative arts, as seen in a recto/verso drawing featuring a design for a Rococo wall with a fountain, swans, and a male figure holding a staff (Fig. 3). Like Watteau, Pater used red chalk for his preparatory drawings, which often contained multiple figure types or ornamental elements awaiting placement: to be inserted, recombined, or altered as needed for a commission. David Pullins has argued that this modular approach allowed artists to build up or break down their compositions with ease.¹⁰ Figure studies functioned as visual currency—reentering compositions in different guises, whether destined for a decorative panel, a cabinet picture, or an easel painting. In the case of The Garden Party, for instance, a drawing of two women seen from complementary vantage points (Fig. 4) finds visual echoes in the seated young girls facing opposite directions, underscoring the mobility and reuse of figural templates in Pater’s repertoire.¹¹

The turbaned African servant at right is a recurrent motif in art from the seventeenth century into the eighteenth.¹² Watteau’s Three Studies of a Young Black Man (Fig. 5) provide a prototype for several of Pater’s fête galante figures; Pater likely had access to the same sitter or to Watteau’s studies.¹³ Many scholars have argued that such figures signify the “global turn” of eighteenth-century French art, intersecting with chinoiserie, turquerie, and other exoticizing modes.¹⁴ In Pater’s case, the turbaned figure’s repetition is especially striking: Florence Ingersoll-Smouse’s catalogue raisonné shows him appearing with remarkable frequency and formal consistency, sometimes rendered White in other versions.¹⁵ As Pullins notes, such figures were deployed as compositional elements as much as individuated subjects. Here, the servant’s elaborate green and pink silk livery merges type and individuality, contributing to the scene’s cosmopolitan surface while reinforcing its hierarchical structure. Recent scholarship, notably by Pullins and Adrienne L. Childs, has framed such ornamental Blackness within the decorative arts as part of a broader, racialized visual economy—a context that warrants further investigation in Pater’s work.¹⁶

If The Garden Party engages with the theatrical decorum of the fête galante, The Bathers moves into more explicitly erotic territory. A group of women in various states of undress frolic around a shallow pool in a secluded glade. On the left, a sculptural group of two cupids riding a dolphin, an emblem of Venus, crowns the baroque fountain that feeds the pool; at right, a stone pavilion closes the space. At the composition’s center, a bather with her back to the viewer climbs from the water, her chemise soaked and clinging—a pose Pater reused in multiple bathing scenes, including versions in the Rosenberg Collection (Fig. 6) and others.¹⁷ Technical examination of the Kansas City painting shows that this figure’s drapery was originally shorter and more revealing, likely lengthened in the early nineteenth century for reasons of modesty (Fig. 29).¹⁸ Just like the woman and the dog in The Garden Party, the repetition of this central bather within Pater’s body of work exemplifies the artist’s broader practice of reusing motifs. Yet the dog serves as a decorative anchor within a convivial, public tableau, while here the bather’s backward glance and wet drapery create a charged sense of exposure—heightened by the male onlooker (and arguably also the male servant) at the back right, whose gaze intrudes on this otherwise secluded scene. In The Garden Party, multiple male figures appear, but their presence feels integrated into the orchestrated interplay of the fête, rather than suggestive of illicit trespass.

This male spectator in The Bathers recalls the Greek myth of Diana and Actaeon—in which Actaeon spies on Diana’s nymphs as they bathe—reframed here as a secular, libertine fantasy where secluded female spaces become spectacles for male (and, by extension, the viewer’s) gaze.¹⁹ Pater’s approach is relatively restrained: only one woman is topless, while others reveal their bodies through wet drapery or partial undress. This contrasts with Watteau’s Diana at Her Bath (Musée du Louvre), where the mythological context legitimizes full nudity, and the famously chaste goddess is alone.²⁰ Pater makes no attempt to disguise the contemporaneity of his scene, signaling it through both the title—absent any mythological illusion—and the dress of the figures: some wear or discard elegant silks suggestive of fashionable Parisiennes, while others are clad more plainly, evoking rural types who might possibly have strayed into this pastoral enclave. The eroticism resides in suggestion, in the play of wet fabric, sidelong glances, and voyeuristic interruption rather than overt display. Unlike Watteau, who rarely depicted nudes outside of mythological contexts, Pater repeatedly returned to such scenes, producing more than fifty variations.

Both The Garden Party and The Bathers reflect an ideal of elite leisure in the 1720s and early 1730s, projecting aristocratic pleasure onto a fictional countryside that stages the rituals of conversation, seduction, and repose. Although they are linked in ownership, format, and certain compositional devices—for example, the matching cylindrical plinths at right that serve as beverage stations—the two paintings differ markedly in mood and theme. The Garden Party is public, performative, and rooted in codes of elite sociability; The Bathers, by contrast, plays more overtly to erotic fantasy, with its secluded setting, voyeuristic premise, and subtle cues of social mixing. The presence of both refined and rustic dress hints at a licentious pastoral ideal; one that blurs class boundaries for sensual effect. Their juxtaposition reflects the breadth of Pater’s range and the adaptability of his compositional vocabulary. As Martin Eidelberg has observed, eighteenth-century interiors often paired dissimilar subjects for visual and conversational variety, and it is plausible that the Kansas City pair was acquired with such a display in mind.²¹

The two paintings also diverge stylistically. The palette of The Bathers is cooler than that of The Garden Party, the brushwork sketchier, and the forms more atmospheric. While dating Pater’s works is notoriously difficult, such handling supports a slightly later date for The Bathers. Unless one counts the overdoor at the Petit Trianon in Versailles (ca. 1720; Fig. 7), whose tone and treatment are markedly different from The Bathers, Pater seems not to have engaged with bathing subjects until around 1728–29.²² This suggests a date for The Bathers between 1728 and 1730, likely following Pater’s reception at the Académie Royale in 1728 and after he completed The Garden Party.

In both works, Pater’s reuse of motifs—whether drawn from Watteau, from his own earlier compositions, or from ornamental design—signals his participation in a broader eighteenth-century visual economy. As Pullins has recently argued, this “cut and paste modality” was not merely a workaround for productivity but a well-established mode of invention shaped by workshop practice, collector preference, and commercial demand.²³ Figures, poses, and groupings circulated freely among easel painting, decorative arts, and ornamental prints, with artists often extracting studies from albums for reuse. Rather than aiming for originality in the modern sense, painters like Pater calibrated familiarity and novelty to suit a market that valued variation within recognizable forms.

Pater’s ability to recontextualize familiar motifs for new emotional registers—whether the composed elegance of The Garden Party or the sensual intimacy of The Bathers—demonstrates not only artistic dexterity but also commercial acumen. His prodigious output in these years was likely fueled as much by personal urgency as by external demand, and his strategic recycling of imagery reflects a studio practice attuned to the expectations of collectors and dealers. Positioned between civility and seduction, tradition and adaptation, Pater’s paintings speak to a period culture that prized pleasure and recognition as much as innovation.

Notes

1. In a recent publication, David Pullins redefines eighteenth-century French painting by showing how artists such as Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755), and François Boucher (1703–1770) relied on a “cut-and-paste” approach, in which motifs circulated freely across media, contexts, and collaborative studios—a model that also illuminates Pater’s practice. See David Pullins, The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2024), esp. 95, in which the author discusses the idea of recycling and collaboration, positing that the redeployment of motifs and the imitation of extant passages originated by other artists constituted a practical solution to commercial demands rather than an erudite citation.

2. Pater initially studied with a local painter and then with his father, who was a sculptor, before working briefly under Watteau in Paris. The only catalogue raisonné and substantive account of Pater’s life remains Florence Ingersoll-Smouse, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater: Biographie et catalogue critiques, l’œuvre complète de l’artiste (Paris: Les Beaux-arts, 1928).

3. For Pater’s morceau de reception (reception piece), see Jean-Baptiste Pater, Une Fête Champêtre: Réjouissance de Soldats, 1728, oil on canvas, 44 7/8 x 60 5/8 in. (114 x 154 cm), Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. 7137, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010061409.

4. Richard Rand noted this in his catalogue entry for this pair of paintings in Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, exh. cat. (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1997), 101–3.

5. See, in particular, Peter Paul Rubens, Rubens, Helena Fourment (1614–1673), and Their Son Frans (1633–1678), ca. 1635, oil on wood, 80 1/4 x 62 1/4 in. (203.8 x 158.1 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1981.238, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437532.

6. Christoph Vogtherr has observed: “A pattern emerged that, for Pater, almost exclusively drawings of individual figures, mostly from the immediate foreground of his compositions, can be identified, but so far no composition drawings.” Vogtherr suggests that Pater would take a single motif here and there and insert it into a composition, thus creating something new. See Christoph Vogtherr et al., Französische Gemälde I: Watteau, Pater, Lancret, Lajoüe (Berlin: Akademie, 2011), 245–47.

7. I am grateful to Yuriko Jackall, who offered this suggestion via email on July 18, 2024. Jackall suggested it reminded her of the reclining stone statue in the background of Antoine Watteau, Les Champs Elisées, ca. 1720–21, oil on walnut panel, 12 1/4 x 16 1/8 in. (31.2 x 41 cm), Wallace Collection, London, P389, https://wallacelive.wallacecollection.org:443/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=65323&viewType=detailView.

8. I am grateful to Christoph Martin Vogtherr, who offered this suggestion via email on August 18, 2024. For examples of this type of ornamental design, see Jean Berain, engraved by Gérard Jean-Baptiste Scotin (1698–after 1755) and others, Ornament Designs Invented by J. Berain, 1711 or after, engraving, 20 5/16 x 16 in. (51.6 x 40.6 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 21.36.141, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/345898.

9. Pullins, Mobile Image, 51, 56.

10. Pullins, Mobile Image, 99.

11. There is no definitive catalogue raisonnée of Pater’s drawings.

12. The motif of the exoticized Black figure in art has many seventeenth-century precedents, deftly unpacked in Judy Sund, “Middleman: Antoine Watteau and ‘Les Charmes de La Vie,’” Art Bulletin 91, no. 1 (2009): 59–82.

13. See, in particular, Jean Antoine Watteau, La Conversation, 1712–13, oil on canvas, 19 3/4 x 24 in. (50.2 x 61 cm), Toledo Museum of Art, 1971.152, https://emuseum.toledomuseum.org/objects/55384/la-conversation.

14. See Sund, “Middleman,” 66–76. See also David Pullins, “Watteau’s Black Models,” in Univers de Watteau: Résaux et influence autour d’Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), ed. Alex Moulnier (Paris: L’Échelle de Jacob, 2022), 183–89.

15. See Ingersoll-Smouse, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater, nos. 29, 30, 40, 41, 51, 200bis, pp. 241, 474, 506, 558, 561, 604. Pullins also makes this observation in “Watteau’s Black Models,” 189.

16. See Adrienne L. Childs, “Sugarboxes and Blackamoors: Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain,” in Michael E.Yonan and Alden Cavanagh, eds., The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 159–77; and Childs, “A Blackamoor’s Progress: The Ornamental Black Body in European Furniture,” in Awam Amkpa, ed., ReSignifications: European Blackamoors, Africana Readings (Rome: Postcart SRL, 2017), 116–26, cited in Pullins, “Watteau’s Black Models,” 189n40.

17. See Ingersoll-Smouse, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater, figs. 83, 86, 88, 89, 97–98, and 102, pp. 44–46, 144, 146–48, 153, 157.

18. See the accompanying technical entry by paintings conservator Diana M. Jaskierny, “Jean-Baptiste Pater, The Bathers, 1728–30,” https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.327.2088.

19. Ingersoll-Smouse has proposed that Pater’s bather scenes may have been commissioned by members of libertine societies or cénacles galants (gallant gatherings), aristocratic circles devoted to wit, sensuality, and unorthodox pleasures. See Ingersoll-Smouse, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Pater, 14.

20. See Antoine Watteau, Diana at Her Bath, 1715/16, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 39 3/4 in. (80 x 101 cm), Musée du Louvre, Paris, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010066605.

21. In an email exchange with the author (August 8, 2024), Martin Eidelberg explained that the pairing of two dissimilar themes was not at all unusual for the period.

22. This overdoor painting from the dining room of the Petit Trianon, commissioned by Louis XV, is one of Pater’s earliest known works. It had previously been attributed to Watteau on stylistic grounds. See the object entry in the collections database, “Le Bain,” POP: la plateforme ouverte du patrimoine, Ministère de la Culture, updated February 8, 2024, https://pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/joconde/000PE006535.

23. Pullins, Mobile Image, 1.

The Garden Party (Fête Champêtre), painted by Jean-Baptiste Pater, demonstrates the artist’s combination of fine detail and active brushwork. In the painting, groups of figures interact dynamically. They wear rich fabric, both in color and texture, which contrasts with the soft, diffuse background.

Attached to a five-member stretcher, the painting appears to have been executed on a twill-weave canvas; however, weave interference from an early lining has complicated positively identifying the canvas weave. Although the tacking margins are no longer extant, likely removed during the lining process, cusping along the top, left, and right sides indicates that the painting retains approximately its original dimensions.¹

The canvas appears to have been prepared with a double ground of pale earth red or peach, followed by an off-white layer.² The lower peach layer is visible in few areas, such as along the original edges and in isolated cracks and small losses (Fig. 8). The luminosity of the upper ground layer remains visible throughout the composition. Across the majority of the composition, a thin semitransparent brown wash provides a warm tone beneath the foreground and trees.³ Underlying, sweeping marks near the left edge of sky (Fig. 9) appear to be the result of the ground application with a broad spatula, although which ground layer cannot be determined.

Infrared reflectography reveals a faint underdrawing, with a fluid medium used in the background and exterior figures, and a thin, dry medium used within the central figures. In the right-side foreground, the attendant’s proper left foot was left unpainted, revealing Pater’s sketching process (Fig. 10). Similarly, near the center of the composition, the initial sketch for the kneeling figure’s leg can be discerned beneath glazes of brown paint applied to develop the folds and translucent shadows of the clothing (Fig. 11). The underdrawing is difficult to see in areas that are more thickly or opaquely painted, but glimpses can be found, such as in the hand of the central female figure and the fold of fabric where she pinches her gown (Fig. 12).

With the underdrawing in place, Pater laid in brown washes to roughly block in the scene. He then developed the figures with opaque layers. Brown washes remain visible in many of the faces, possibly an intentional technique used to create shadows. However, some of this may also be due to abrasion of the upper paint layer. Dashes of an opaque red earth pigment were used to create deeper shadows, such as for creases in the neck, while a translucent red lake pigment was used to enhance the facial features. The eye and lashes of the foreground girl were created with two flicks of red lake (Fig. 13).⁴ Similarly, opaque red paint was added to emphasize the contours of the figures, as is seen in the fingers of Figure 12. Each of these details in the uppermost paint layer appear to be final touches to the composition. The background was likely painted concurrently with the figures or after the figures. In much of the composition, the background paint was brought close to but does not touch the figures, while in a few locations, there is a slight overlap onto the figures as the background was refined.

A wide variety of brushwork is found throughout the composition. Many fabric textures were formed with painterly strokes, as, for example, in the white ruffles around the male figure’s neck (Fig. 14), while structured garments have a draftsman-like quality, such as in the boning in the bodice of the foreground girl (Fig. 15). Though most figures are fully rendered, in some instances Pater economically utilized the lower washes as both shadows and middle tones, while highlights were added to help define the shapes. An obvious example of this can be seen in the central woman’s shoe, where apart from the brown wash of the foreground, only a few lines of yellow form the structure and design (Fig. 16).

The majority of the painting was completed with wet-over-dry or wet-over-wet paint application. The flowers in the female figures’ hair and in the foreground basket, however, appear to be more intentionally blended with wet-into-wet application, as Pater dragged colors together. This is especially noticeable when comparing the difference in paint applications between the loosely painted flowers and the structured basket in the foreground (Fig. 17). Here the artist pulled the highlights of the flowers over and through the lower saturated colors. In contrast, the weave of the basket does not appear to have intentional blending, as it was developed with pale yellow and muted orange lines, each under one millimeter wide.

Pater used atmospheric perspective to create a hazy appearance for the distant foliage by means of pale colors and less defined forms. He gradually added greater detail and color saturation for elements approaching the foreground.⁵ Leaves of the trees range from greens to oranges, with red lake used sparingly to intensify the richness in the shadows. However, the overall color profile of the foliage may have shifted with age or damage. Many of the leaves in the final layer appear granular, with coarse white, black, and orange pigment particles, indicating that a sensitive pigment in the foliage is no longer present (Fig. 18). Whether the altered appearance was caused through abrasion or fading, it is difficult to speculate how the foliage appeared when it was freshly painted.

The painting is overall in good condition after having undergone multiple conservation campaigns throughout its history. Prior to entering the Nelson-Atkins collection, the painting was glue-paste lined, a structural treatment that continues to support the original canvas. In 1982, after entering the collection, a discolored varnish layer was removed and fills at the turnover edges were adjusted, and in some areas, the original canvas edges were revealed.⁶ Despite widespread abrasion in the figures’ faces and in the background foliage, there is limited retouching present, with most from the 1982 campaign along the turnover edges and in isolated losses within the picture plane.

Notes

1. The picture plane was increased between three and five millimeters on the top, bottom, and right edges during the lining process and approximately ten centimeters on the left edge near the top. Muted pink fill material and retouching covers the expanded space.

2. A similar double ground was found on Fête Galante (ca. 1721–25; National Gallery, London), with an “orange-red followed by a warm buff colour.” Humphrey Wine, The Eighteenth Century French Paintings (London: National Gallery, 2018), 364.

3. This wash layer appears to be present in all areas except beneath the upper left sky. Within the sky, there do not appear to be any washes between the off-white ground and the final paint layer.

4. No elemental analysis has been completed to identify the pigments.

5. Similar descriptions of haziness or “foggy” backgrounds have been noted in other Pater paintings dated to the late 1720s. Christoph Martin Vogtherr, Watteau at the Wallace Collection (London: Wallace Collection, 2011), 133.

6. Forrest R. Bailey, October 22, 1982, treatment report, NAMA conservation file, no. F82-35/1.