The Fair at Bezons

The Fair at Bezons, painted in 1730 and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of Jean-Baptiste Pater's most celebrated works and one of the most complete pictures of popular outdoor festivity in eighteenth-century French painting. The village of Bezons on the Seine north-west of Paris hosted an annual late-summer fair that attracted Parisians of all social ranks for dancing, eating, fortune-telling, and theatrical entertainments. Pater — who trained under Watteau and was the only artist Watteau personally instructed — inherited his master's interest in the fête but extended it to include a broader social range and a greater sense of crowd and movement. The Metropolitan's canvas deploys his characteristic compositional device of a broad, shallow frieze of figures arranged across a park or field, with trees providing a screening backdrop. The subject's democratic inclusiveness — aristocrats mingling with commoners — makes it a revealing social document of pre-Revolutionary Paris.

Pater built the composition as a panoramic frieze running the full width of the canvas, subdividing the crowd into interacting clusters rather than a uniform mass. His brushwork is rapid and fluid, capturing the movement and animation of a crowded outdoor gathering with abbreviated marks that suggest rather than describe individual figures. The palette is lighter and more variegated than Watteau's, reflecting the developing Rococo taste for clear, fresh colour.