Jean Baptiste Huet I (1) (he also signed his name Hüet and Huët) was born into a family of artists in Paris in 1745. He had his first lessons with his father, Nicolas Huet (ca. 1718-after 1780), an animal and armorial painter in the French royal administration for furnishings (garde-meuble du roi), before being apprenticed with the animal painter Charles Dagomer (ca. 1700-ca. 1768). In 1766, he continued his training with Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734-1781), who had studied with François Boucher (1703-1770). Huet continued to work for Le Prince until the later 1760s and assimilated Boucher’s style, becoming a skillful imitator. Between 1765 and 1770, Huet collaborated with Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) on a decorative scheme for the house of the engraver Gilles Demarteau (1722-1776) in Paris. (2)

In 1769, Huet married Marie-Généviève, daughter of the painter Jean-François Chevalier, by whom he had three sons, all of whom became artists. On July 29, 1769, Huet was accepted as an academician at the Parisian Académie Royal de Peinture et de Sculpture. Although he had wanted to be a history painter, the French Academy admitted him as an animal painter (animalier). Nevertheless, he achieved success with his art, painting animal vignettes and pastoral landscapes, often with shepherds or shepherdesses, in which the influence of François Boucher is evident. And like other pastoral landscape painters of his time, he found inspiration in the work of the Dutch genre painters and French landscape painters of the seventeenth century. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon between 1769 and 1789 and again in 1800 and 1801. Between 1800 and 1802 he exhibited highly naturalistic animal paintings at the Palais National des Science et des Arts. Beginning about 1780, he contributed designs for the royal tapestry factories of the Gobelins and Beauvais. Starting in 1783, Huet also contributed designs for the royal textile factory in Jouy-en-Josas, where he collaborated with the textile manufacturer Christophe Philippe Oberkampf as the principal designer for printed cottons. (3) Huet died in Paris in 1811.

Huet’s Pastorale is a landscape painting without either the classical references of the mature Neoclassical or the amorous subjects of the Rococo as made famous by François Boucher and others. In the foreground, a seated and a standing shepherdess, their backs to the viewer, watch their goats and sheep beside a river that flows through the three arches of a bridge. A stand of trees is seen to the left in the foreground, and at the right in the middle ground is a rocky promontory on which a man stands. He also may be a shepherd tending either goats or sheep. In the background is a hilly landscape with a walled, stone farmhouse or villa with a dominant tower. The landscape seems to dissolve into the atmosphere so that there is no clear horizon line. The overall composition is reminiscent of French Baroque pastoral landscapes of the seventeenth century, except that the composition has been made vertical, perhaps to better suit its hanging on the vertical wall panels typical of the eighteenth century. Although the softness of the rendering of the trees suggests the French Rococo, the painting is otherwise composed in a manner that suggests Huet’s growing interest in the French Neoclassical of the 1780s. This is seen in the triangular composition formed by the shepherdesses and their sheep as well as the arched bridge, which is reminiscent of the ruins of ancient Roman aqueducts. Huet would depict actual ruins and give more realistic detail to the landscape elements beginning in the 1790s.

Pastorale follows the tradition of Italianate landscape paintings first popularized by the Italian Renaissance painters Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1430-1516) and Giorgione (ca. 1477-1510) and later championed by the seventeenth-century French artists Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (ca. 1600-1682). Although sometimes overtly topographical or classically ideal, the Italian landscape genre more often was conceived as a pastiche of typical images (secluded meadows and rivers flanked by stands of trees and hills, aged houses or cottages, ancient or long-standing constructions, and crude country roads) that generated a profound feeling of rural solitude. Especially Claude became a master of this genre, and in this painting, Huet seems directly inspired by this tradition. Like Claude, Huet frames a distant atmospheric view by the high grounds of the valley on both sides. A steep slope at the side stresses the ruggedness and remoteness of the terrain, and a winding river and distant hills suggest both the vastness of the landscape and the peaceful isolation of the figures in the foreground.

Mildred Bliss, who with her husband Robert Woods Bliss founded the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in 1940, retained this painting as part of her personal collection until her death in 1969. In 1966, Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) chose to photograph her in front of Pastorale at her Georgetown home. (4)

(1) Jean Baptiste Huet and his art have been little studied, and there is no recent biography. The last detailed monograph was C. Gabillot, Les Hüet: Jean-Baptiste et ses Trois Fils (Paris, 1892). See also Laure Hug, “Recherches sur la Biographie du Peintre Jean-Baptiste Huët (1745-1811),” Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art Français - Année 1998 (1999), 158-173.

(2) Jacques Wilhelm, “Le Salon du Graveur Gilles Demarteau Peint par François Boucher et son Atelier avec le Concours de Fragonard et de Jean-Baptiste Huet,” Bulletin du Musée Carnavalet vol. 28, no. 1 (1975), 6-20.

(3) See Laure Hut, “Jean Baptiste Huët and the Decorative Arts,” The Magazine Antiques (August, 2002), 54-61.

(4) Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C., Archives, AR.PH.BL.058. See James N. Carder, ed., Home of the Humanities, The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss (Washington, D.C., 2010), fig. 1.19.

J. Carder

Purchased from Trotti & Cie, Paris, by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, 8/17/1922.

Collection of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss, Washington, D.C., 8/17/1922-1/17/1969.

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, House Collection, Washington, D.C.