Despite Edmond de Goncourt’s dismissive criticism of Jean-Baptiste Huet, as ‘the copyist, the plagiarist, of the drawings, of the motifs, of the very techniques, of Boucher…let us say it out loud: what with Boucher that is pretty sometimes has grandeur to it, is never anything but pretty with Huet’, his collection contained no less than six drawings by him (as against thirteen by François Boucher [1703-1770], together with one doubtfully ascribed to him, and a watercolour – the brothers’ very first acquisition – that was more probably actually by Huet). It may be significant, however, that all of them were acquired during the lifetime of Jules de Goncourt.
There is no denying that Huet was Boucher’s most faithful imitator – despite never having been his pupil. With time, however, he developed both a style and a technique of his own, even if one of the chief modes that he practised, that of the pastoral, had been one of the most distinctive ones of his idol. However, he also had a particular facility for depicting animals. The technique was that of watercolour, which it would often be more accurate to call ‘coloured drawing’, as well as gouache. The style was more minute than that of Boucher, and it would be fair to call it, as Goncourt did, ‘pretty’. It first emerged in the mid-1770s (an early example is that of the Shepherdess and Market-girl Conversing in a Landscape of 1774; Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN). Huet may have been encouraged to take this path by the critical drubbing that his attempt at a large-scale history painting in oils, of Hercules and Omphale (location unknown), received when it was shown in the 1779 Salon. By then, however, he not only had a considerable body of collectors eager to obtain his drawings, watercolours and gouaches – so much so, that he felt no need to exhibit anything in the Salon in the year that the present one was made – but he had also had a gifted engraver specialising in the reproduction of drawings, Gilles Demarteau, known as Demarteau l’Aîné (1722-1776), to satisfy the wider market for his compositions. Gilles’ nephew, Gilles-Antoine Demarteau (1750-1802), continued to engrave and publish Huet’s compositions in the same vein, albeit less well, but there were numerous other skilful engravers, such as Louis-Marin Bonnet (1736-1793) and J. Augustin L’Eveillé (dates unknown) who reproduced his work.
The present watercolour is a charming example of Huet’s work in this vein. It is a little unusual in that, instead of enlivening his landscape with rural figures and animals, he has placed there a fashionably dressed lady who would be more at home in one of his interior scenes. Angling was, however, a pastime that gentlewomen could indulge in (possibly a result of influence from England). Huet may also have intended the surreptitious implication that women also had hooks of another kind, designed for human prey (‘A woman […] is a very angle, hir he[a]rt is a nett, and hir handes are cheynes’; Myles Coverdale’s translation of Ecclesiastes, 7:26).
From a large family of artists, he practised in Paris as a painter, engraver and designer. Strongly influenced by François Boucher, he produced pastoral landscapes and genre scenes in the Rococo style; he had a gift for depicting animals. Aside from his engravings, he is also known for his decorative art designs, in particular for textiles.