The Two Coaches

Two coaches meet head-on in a narrow Paris street, and neither will back up. The Louvre traces the scene to a real incident of this kind, which was worked into a short sketch tacked on to The Saint-Germain Fair, a comedy by Jean-François Regnard and Charles Dufresny first staged in 1695. In it the passengers are Harlequin and Scaramouche, both dressed as women. They and their drivers shout each other down until a passing judge steps in to make peace and is chased off for his trouble.

Gillot built up to this canvas through a series of drawings, and the Louvre keeps one of them too, in pen and red chalk. When the painting came up for sale in Paris in 1805, the catalogue gave it to Gillot's far more famous pupil, Antoine Watteau. It later belonged to a collector in Saint Petersburg, and the Louvre bought it in 1923.