Dance Before a Fountain, 1724 Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Nicolas Lancret also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Dance Before a Fountain is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

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The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A thin jet of water flickers in the right-hand gloom, almost shy beside all that stone. The fountain is monumental, yes, but Nicolas Lancret lets it behave like a discreet accompanist, keeping time while satin skirts and bright sleeves do the real talking.

In Dance Before a Fountain (1724), two couples step through a country dance on a patch of turf that feels springy underfoot. One man, in a blue coat lined with warm rose, extends his arm with courtly insistence; his partner answers with a pale, cloudlike dress that catches light in small, quick touches. Nearby, another pair turns more tentatively, as if trying out the rules before committing. Around them the park becomes a theatre of flirtation: to the left, seated figures lean in and watch; to the right, under the fountain’s architecture, conversations knot and loosen. A little dog noses the ground; a seated woman in deep blue lies back as though the music has made her suddenly heavy-limbed.

Listen closely, and you can almost hear the rustic bagpipe, a reedy sound that would cut through polite laughter. Lancret belongs to that specifically French invention, the fête galante, where elegant people pretend – perhaps for an afternoon – that social ceremony has melted into pastoral ease. Yet nothing here is truly accidental. The composition is cunningly staged between the dense trees on the left and the hard verticals of the fountain on the right, a corridor of air and sky opening behind the dancers like a promise.

Color does the persuading. Mossy greens and umber earth hold the scene steady while coral, butter yellow, and ice blue flicker across the group in rhythmic repeats. Notice one particular delight: the way Lancret drags a lighter paint over a sleeve and leaves tiny broken highlights, like creases that breathe. Those fluid strokes, so confident and quick, feel close to Watteau’s example, though Lancret is a touch more sociable, less wistful.

Standing before it at the Paul Getty Museum Center Los Angeles California USA, one might imagine the air smelling faintly of wet stone and crushed leaves. The picture doesn’t moralise; it simply admits how pleasurable rehearsal can be – love as a dance you learn in company, with the fountain murmuring on.