'Dans cette aimable solitude...'

The title quotes a verse from a popular French song about solitary reverie, and Lancret illustrates it with figures in a secluded garden setting, around 1717, now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Song illustration was a minor but distinctive genre in French Rococo painting, connecting visual art to the fashionable world of salon music and amateur performance. The Fitzwilliam acquired important French eighteenth-century works through several bequests, making it one of the strongest British collections of this period.

Lancret creates an intimate composition appropriate to the song"s themes of solitude and contemplation, using enclosing foliage to suggest seclusion. The palette favors muted greens and golden browns with touches of brighter color in the costumes. The brushwork shows the delicate touch of Lancret"s early period, with careful attention to faces and hands that conveys the emotional content of the song while maintaining the decorative surface expected of cabinet paintings.