fête champêtre

His most spectacular innovation was the biennial fête champêtre, which he first produced at Stourhead in 1979.

A Fête champêtre was a popular form of entertainment in the 18th century, taking the form of a garden party.

Fifteen years later I saw him again, leading his band at our local fête champêtre at Stourhead.

It doesn't quite live up to its avowed ambition to update the "fête champêtre" so memorably realized in paintings by Giorgione and Manet.

The Fête champêtre of Titian (or Giorgione) may represent a mythological subject, if not a feast then at least a picnic of the gods.

Within the grounds, overlooking the lake, is an unusual turfed amphitheatre, which used to form the centrepiece of an annual event called the Claremont Fête champêtre.

Léogâne is the host location for several annual events, which attracts national and international visitors to the city each year, distinctly Rara and Fête Champêtre.

In the following season she was again at Covent Garden, where she played Blanch Mackay in Carron Side, or the Fête Champêtre, on 27 May 1828.

The Pastoral Concert, Fête champêtre or Le Concert champêtre is an oil painting of c. 1509 attributed to either of the Italian Renaissance masters, Titian (more usually today) or Giorgione.

Originally billed as "a romantic evening of music, floodlighting and fireworks", the Stourhead fête champêtre is part conversazione, part masquerade, in which guests stroll along the paths or are rowed across the lake in search of new delights.

If you would rather get your hands dirty than stand around admiring gardens, from July 12-19, you could help the National Trust to prepare Stourhead's famous 18-century landscape garden for the Fête Champêtre, an event that attracts up to 10,000 people over two nights.

This weekend's "grande fête champêtre," or great countryside feast, took place in the shade of linden trees beside the campanile of the University of California, a few yards from the spot where Mario Savio and his Free Speech followers staged protests in 1964.

A famous painting, the Pastoral Concert (as the Louvre now call it) dated to ca. 1509 and variously attributed to Giorgione, Titian, and Sebastiano del Piombo, was named Fête champêtre when it first became part of the Louvre collection.

The heroine’s three very different lovers – yeoman, soldier, gentleman – invite a variety of pairwork, and the “rustic chorus” offers any number of pretexts for yokel ensembles (ones indeed that make the more refined harvesters in Ashton's Fille Mal Gardée look like a fête champêtre).

It is possible that the ghosts may have been real people wearing 18th-century costume, dressed up either for a fête champêtre or for a film, or perhaps as guests at one of the parties which were known to have been held around this time at the Petit Trianon by the dandyish Comte de Montesquieu.

A solution has now been offered and, if we accept it, we were right: the ladies had truthfully reported what they had seen, but in fact it was a sort of fancy-dress fête champêtre organized by Robert de Montesquiou: as no official permission had been granted for this, the authorities denied all knowledge of it.

While the term is derived from the French expression for a "pastoral festival" or "country feast" and in theory was a simple form of entertainment, in practice (especially in the 18th century), a fête champêtre was often a very elegant form of entertainment involving on occasions whole orchestras hidden in trees, with guests sometimes in fancy dress.