La Chasse, La Pêche

La Chasse, La Pêche — The Hunt, The Fishing — suggests a pair or double subject in a single canvas, evoking the long tradition of hunting and fishing scenes in aristocratic decorative painting. Watteau, Oudry, and Desportes had established hunting as an appropriate subject for elite interior decoration, and Monticelli's engagement with it connects his Rococo inheritance to his Provençal environment, where hunting and fishing were active practices. The Princeton Art Museum canvas places this work in the American collection alongside the Figure Study, suggesting a coherent acquisition of Monticelli's thematic range. His treatment of outdoor action subjects typically subordinates the literal content to atmospheric colour — the figures in motion become colour events in a landscape governed by light.

A double subject — hunt and fish — likely means two distinct figural groups connected by a shared landscape. Monticelli's composition would establish colour zones for each activity, using warm animal and costume tones against the cooler landscape ground to create legible focal points within the overall chromatic unity.