'Les quatre heures de jour' (folding screen)

Painted around 1717 as a folding screen, this decorative work depicting the four times of day belongs to the earliest phase of Lancret"s career, when he was still a young painter recently admitted to the orbit of Watteau. Decorative screens were luxury items in early eighteenth-century France, commissioned for aristocratic interiors, and Lancret"s ability to adapt his fete galante compositions to this format helped establish his reputation. The Victoria and Albert Museum acquired this rare surviving example of Rococo decorative furniture painting.

Adapting his compositions to the vertical panels of a folding screen, Lancret arranges four distinct scenes representing morning, midday, afternoon, and evening. Each panel balances figures with landscape in a narrow vertical format, requiring tighter compositions than his freestanding canvases. The palette shifts subtly across the panels to suggest the changing light of day—cool morning tones warming through midday gold to the deeper hues of evening. The surface shows the wear patterns typical of functional furniture painting.