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Three young boys, four girls, and a dark brown dog gather in a loose semi-circle in a grassy clearing near a grove of trees in this horizontal landscape painting. The children all have pale skin with flushed cheeks, brown hair, and dark eyes. The girls wear corseted dresses with long skirts and cap-like bonnets, and the boys wear jackets with tails, knee-length pants, stockings, and black shoes with buckles. The three boys look at us while the four girls look around the scene. A long plank of wood has been laid across a thick, sawed tree trunk to make a seesaw. One boy, wearing fawn brown, sits on one end near the ground, to our left. The oldest girl braces the youngest on the opposite end of the plank, which is lifted into the air. The oldest girl wears a sheer, white apron over a coral-pink dress. Like the other two girls, the youngest child wears a white dress but hers has a pink sash and pink ribbons are tied into her and the oldest girl’s white caps. A boy wearing a moss-green suit looks at us and raises his dark cap in one hand as he stands balanced with his feet widely planted at the center of the angled plank of wood. To our right and closer to us, one of the younger girls, wearing a topaz-blue sash with a blue ribbon in her cap, stands in front of the oldest boy, who holds a tall staff that reaches off the top edge of the painting in the crook of one elbow. This boy holds a small silver fish in both hands. The girl touches one of his hands with her own, and looks up at the fish. The fourth girl and the dog sit on the ground at the front center of the painting. The dog rests its front legs across her lap and she looks off to our right. A pool of water reflects light in the lower right corner of the painting, and a deeply shadowed, verdant forest frames the rightmost third of the composition. Upon closer inspection, we find an open basket and red cloth near the water, almost lost in shadow near the lower right corner of the painting. Beyond the group of children, a tree-filled valley leads back to another body of water and hills in the deep distance to our left, and a few pale gray clouds float across a blue sky.

Johann Zoffany

The Lavie Children, c. 1770

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 61

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 102.5 x 127.6 cm (40 3/8 x 50 1/4 in.)

framed: 125.7 x 151.1 x 7.6 cm (49 1/2 x 59 1/2 x 3 in.)

Credit Line

Paul Mellon Collection

Accession Number

1983.1.48

Artists / Makers

Johann Zoffany (artist) British, 1733 - 1810

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
Read our full Open Access policy for images .

Provenance

Painted for Germain Lavie [d. 1781], Putney, London; by inheritance to his daughter, Emilia Lavie Lechmere [Mrs. Luther Lechmere], one of the children in the picture; by inheritance to her son, John Lechmere; by inheritance to his widow, Sophie Lechmere; by inheritance to her nephew, Charles Luther Lechmere; by inheritance to his sister, Grace Lechmere Reynolds; by inheritance to her daughter, Grace Reynolds Lewis [Mrs. Philip H. Lewis], London;[1] (sale, Sotheby's, London, 29 June 1960, no. 46); (Frost & Reed, London); (John Nicholson Gallery, New York); purchased October 1960 by Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia; gift 1983 to NGA.

[1] The descent in the family was outlined by Grace Lewis in a letter of 18 August 1960 to John Nicholson Gallery, copy in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Frost & Reed
Lavie, Germain
Lechmere, Charles Luther
Lechmere, Emilia
Lechmere, John
Lechmere, Sophie
Lewis, Grace Reynolds
Mellon, Paul
Nicholson Gallery, John
Reynolds, Grace Lechmere
Sotheby's

Exhibition History

1963: Painting in England 1700-1850, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 1963, no. 236, repro., pl. 231.

1986: Gifts to the Nation: Selected Acquisitions from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1986, unnumbered checklist

Technical Summary

The medium-weight canvas is loosely plain woven; it has been lined. The ground is cream colored; it is evenly applied and of moderate thickness. The painting is executed in fairly rich and moderately opaque layers with some impasto in the highlights. The entire paint surface is significantly abraded; there are traces of overpaint throughout: a thin layer of light-colored overpaint covers much of the sky. Discrete paint loss is minimal. The natural resin varnish has discolored to a moderate degree.

Bibliography

1971: Praz, Mario. Conversation Pieces. London, 1971: 150, fig. 111.

1978: Egerton, Judy. British Sporting and Animal Paintings 1655-1867: The Paul Mellon Collection. London, 1978: 121-122, pl. 45.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 441, repro.

1992: Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 356-357, repro.

1997: Henderson, Anne. "Portraits & Personalities." Washington Parent (November 1997): 14-15.