On the basis of an apocryphal letter, supposedly written by Watteau to Jean de Julienne in 1720, ‘Rendez-vous de chasse’ was once thought to have been a wedding gift from the artist to his friend’s wife. The first certain owner was the Receiver-General of Taxes, Jean-Baptiste Racine de Jonquoy, in whose collection the picture was named in an engraving of 1731 by Aubert. This work and another now in The Wallace Collection, ‘Fête galante in a Wooded Landscape’ (P391), were described as pendants in a series of sales in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including those of the comte de Vaudreuil, Cardinal Fresch and the duc de Morny. Watteau did not intend them as a pair. The 4th Marquess of Hertford acquired ‘Fête galante in a Wooded Landscape’ for 1,050 guineas at the latter’s sale in London in 1848. He described it in his annotated copy as ‘the most beautiful’ of the two pictures, showing no interest in ‘Rendez-vous de chasse’, which was left unsold at 730 guineas. He passed it over a second time when it was offered at Morny’s Paris sale in 1852, where it was again bought in, this time for 25,000 francs. With typical capriciousness, Hertford finally bought it at the third Morny sale in 1865 for 31,000 francs (about £1,240).