Children in a Garden

Diaz de la Pena produced this painting in the 1840s when he exhibited in the Paris Salon his small-size intimate compositions depicting several figures against a landscape background. Here the frieze-like arrangement of the figures in a lawn between two trees flanking the composition, the idyllically pastoral landscape, the sentimental treatment of children and refined colour scheme reveal the influence of the art of 18th-century painters, Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. In the early 1850s, Diaz de la Pena joined the artists of the Barbizon School.