Fête champêtre with Turkish Courtiers under a Tent

The English title uses a French term, fête champêtre, an open-air party in the country, the kind of scene Antoine Watteau had made fashionable in Paris in these same years. Watteau and Vanmour were both born in Valenciennes, in northern France.

Here the party is Ottoman. Under a tent in the countryside, a group of courtiers eat, drink, make music and make love, with a musician playing at the right, and the Rijksmuseum calls it a licentious picture of the court. In the foreground two guards sit smoking their pipes, paying no attention at all. About a century earlier Sultan Murad IV had banned tobacco and had smokers put to death. By the time Vanmour painted this, the long pipe was an ordinary sight in Istanbul, even in the hands of men on duty.