François Le Moyne

With Thierry Mercier and Hubert Duchemin, Paris;

Where acquired by the present owner, in 1996.

J. Levy, 'Antoine Watteau et François Le Moyne', in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, December 1958, pp. 347-354;

J.-L. Bordeaux, François Le Moyne and his generation, Paris 1984, p. 89, no.39 (with an erroneous provenance).

Appointed First Painter to the King in 1736, Le Moyne is best known for his work as a decorative artist, but throughout his life he also produced many small paintings. This little painting on wood was first displayed in public in the exhibition European Masters of the Eighteenth Century at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1954 to 1955. At that time it was in Major Samuel V. Christie-Miller’s collection and appeared in the catalogue as Putti Playing in a Landscape, attributed to Antoine Watteau. The work’s connection to Watteau was completely ruled out after publication of an article by Jean Lévy in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1958 (J. Lévy, ‘Antoine Watteau et François Le Moyne’, in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, December 1958, p. 347), in which documentary evidence was revealed that confirmed an eighteenth century attribution to François Le Moyne. A pair of small sketches had been engraved by Nicolas Charles de Silvestre: Children shooting arrows at a target and Children playing with the weapons of Mars, both in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

These pendants also appear in the catalogue for the sale of the collection belonging to the painter Jean-François de Troy in 1764, as no. 133: ‘François Le Moine…Deux tableaux de plus précieux de ce grand Peintre, ils représentent des enfants, les uns jouent avec les armes de Dieu Mars, & les autres avec des flèches […]’ (‘François Le Moine…Two paintings, among the most precious by this great painter, depicting children, in one playing with the weapons of the god Mars and in the other with arrows’). The second painting, Children playing with the weapons of Mars, is in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, MA (inv. 1930.184). They both belong to a French tradition of light-hearted scenes depicting children surrounded by mythological attributes, whose semantic import seems however to be somewhat superficial. This is demonstrated by the different titles given to this painting, with the bows and arrows at first associated with Diana in the engraving and later with Cupid in the sales of 1792 and 1795. 

A painting of the same composition and dimensions, with a few variants, appeared in the sale of the Félix Rohatyn Collection (Sotheby’s, New York, 14 October 2020, lot 27) and likely corresponds to the work described by Jean-Luc Bordeaux in his monograph, despite the fact that he illustrates the present painting.