Jean-Baptiste Huet

Signed and dated 1768, this large sheet is among the earliest known landscape drawings by Jean-Baptiste Huet, and may be added to a small group of pastoral subjects drawn by the artist between 1767 and 1771. Among a handful of comparable drawings of the same size, technique, and early date is a Landscape with a Shepherd by a Lake of 1767 in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valenciennes and a Winter Landscape with Two Children, also signed and dated 1767, in a private American collection. Several years after he made this drawing, Huet reused much of the composition for a slightly larger drawing of a Landscape with a Shepherdess, signed and dated 1786.

Jean-Léon Decloux (1840-1929) was a well-known collector of mainly 18th century French furniture, drawings, engravings, porcelain and objets d’art. Much of his important collection of ornamental prints and drawings was sold by him to the Misses Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt and is today in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York.