Au Repos de la Chasse: Hunting Picnics and Transgressive Sociability in Fête Galante Paintings Between Intersectionality and Copresence

In the early eighteenth century, French paintings of sociable hunting picnics became an experimental aesthetic field to deal with issues of social and subjective identities. With the participants seated together nonhierarchically on natural soil, a picnic in contemporary terms is defined as an activity to which everybody must contribute something to share. In fête galante painting, this reciprocity is illustrated by dynamic gestures of communication and mutual serving, including human representatives of different classes, races, and genders, as well as animals. While the depicted characters at first give the impression of having clearly defined roles, a closer look reveals that some seem to evade distinct binary categorizations. By analyzing selected paintings of Jean-Baptiste Pater and Nicolas Lancret, this chapter in particular asks if the different types of relations within fête galante hunting meals visualize and perpetuate the intersecting hegemonic categories common to the hunt or if they rather offer alternative models of copresence and diversity. Taking into account the iconographic, social, and conceptual history of the pique-nique, these figurations of shared pleasure can ultimately even unfold a utopian claim regarding interpersonal, male-female, and interspecies egalitarianism.