The Four Times of Day: Morning

In Morning (Le Matin), the first painting in the series of Lancret’s Four Times of Day, an abbé (priest) is attending a young lady’s toilette as she takes her breakfast and gets dressed for the day. The clock says the time is 9.08 am. The young woman, wearing a skirt with a large flower design of a type fashionable in the 1730s, has turned away from her dressing table to pour hot water into the abbé’s teacup. The porcelain pouring bowl is probably for milk. The cups and saucers of brown-glazed Chinese porcelain of the Kangxi period are also in the latest fashionable style. Tea drinking in France was an activity for the relatively wealthy, so we can assume that the young lady is well-off. The furniture and striped fabric or paper on the walls reinforce the impression of wealth. The young lady’s skirt appears to be made of silk and even her maid looks expensively dressed. The abbé’s powdered hair, frilled shirt cuffs and silver-buckled shoes suggest that he is also comfortably off.Having been admitted just after 9 am, the abbé finds himself in the presence of lady in a state of undress – her right breast exposed and not covered by her chemise or the white cloth covering her shoulders that she wears over it. The association between the toilette and opportunities for flirtation was well recognised. The pair look directly at each other, the abbé risking having his hand scalded by the tea – perhaps a visual metaphor for the risk to his soul. His eyes shine like the glazed teapot, cups and saucers, their rounded forms echoing the woman’s breast. It has been suggested that there is a deliberate confusion between the lady baring her breast and baring her soul to the abbé in the form of her morning confession. However, the presence of the maid makes this interpretation unlikely. Lancret leaves unanswered the question of why there are two spare cups on the table – there are no chairs for other visitors. However, the sense that they might imminently arrive adds a frisson to the scene.Lancret and Hogarth may have responded to each other’s work on either side of the Channel. Hogarth’s prints of his own Four Times of Day, published in 1738, the year before Lancret’s Morning was exhibited at the Salon, are not connected in their subject matter or spirit to Lancret’s series. However, there are similarities between Lancret’s Morning and plate 2 of the engravings after Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, published in 1732, which appears to have inspired Lancret. Hogarth possibly repaid Lancret’s compliment in The Toilette, one of his six pictures from Marriage A-la-Mode, in which the lawyer Silvertongue, wearing a wig and costume similar to those of Lancret’s cleric, pays court to the Countess.