In the Park

Under the Second Empire the French appetite for the 18th century came back hard, and Monticelli spent most of the 1860s in Paris supplying it. Garden parties like this one were the product: decorative panels painted for the Empress Eugénie, fêtes galantes sold on to British and American collectors. He did not work them up from life. The dresses belong to no particular year, the park to no particular place, and the company stands against a wall of foliage so dark that it gives no distance at all. At the front left, among the women in their long pale gowns, there is a small nude figure. The panel measures 36 by 64 centimetres, and at that size each promenading woman is a matter of six or seven loaded strokes.