By Luciano Migliaccio
The figures in Hunting Picnic arranged diagonally along undulated lines show the influence of Pittoni’s Venetian painting, with mythological characters rigorously deployed in the landscape. However, the painter’s sense of nature and of the relationship between figure and environment surpasses that of the more conventional Venetian painting, showing his study of Watteau’s work and particularly Dutch painting. Created at the painter’s workshop mostly as an exercise of a genre, the painting renders quite realistically such themes as fêtes galantes and love scenes featuring classical figures distinguished by Italian art. Instead of the frivolous and mischievous gallantry of mythology, here we have a restful moment, when people set aside social inequality and indulge in their contact with nature. Hunters are made into shepherds in a scene of Arcadian rusticity, where naïve country life contrasts with life in the city and the royal court. This theme was no more than a new fashion in court circles that became quite popular in rococo-style interior decoration. Trained in Lebrun’s grand goût, Lemoyne is the artist of the transition from grandiose Baroque to a new sense of decorative art – a more cordial and intimate decoration, sensitive to the values of both nature and humankind, which opened the path to the rationality of the Age of Enlightenment.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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