Game Main Chaude

Players engage in the game of main chaude—hot cockles—in this early work from around 1717, now at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in New Zealand. Hot cockles, in which a blindfolded player must guess who has struck them, was a popular game in French aristocratic circles and a standard subject for fete galante painters. Like blind man"s buff, it provided opportunities to depict physical contact and flirtation under the cover of innocent play.

The game provides natural compositional drama, with the crouching blindfolded figure creating a low focal point around which standing players are arranged. The garden setting provides the characteristic backdrop of tall trees and filtered light. Lancret"s early palette here tends toward warmer, earthier tones than his later silvery-pink harmonies, and the figure drawing shows the slightly stiff quality of his pre-1720 work.