Long considered a work by Jean-Baptiste Pater or one of his followers, the recently cleaned and treated Fete champetre (Fig2) at the Art Institute of Chicago appears instead to be an unrecognised major painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Of very high quality, it is close in style, motif, and detail to such later works by Watteau as the second version of Le Pelerinage a l'isle de Cithere in Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, Les Champs Elysees in the Wailace Collection (Fig.4), the Fetes venitiennes in Edinburgh (Fig.7) and L'Ile enchantee in a Swiss private collec- tion, and would thus appear to date from c. 1718-21. Information gained from technical examination of the painting also strongly supports an attribution to Watteau, as do the work's condition problems, which are those usually and notoriously found in the paintings of this master. These inherent problems, as well as others caused by later intervention (cf. Fig. 15), have distorted several passages in the work, and partly account for its neglect by scholars in recent decades.

Two paintings recently sold at auction in Nice from a French private collection and there described as 'attributed to Pierre Peyron' have been acquired by the National Gallery, London (Figs.27 and 28).1 Investigation during cleaning has confirmed that they are both autograph works, and their place in the sequence of Peyron's working procedures, as well as their iconography, will be considered in this article.