Larcent was known for his light comedic artworks of everyday people, often using natural and scenic moments to capture them forever. Larcent wasn’t great at drawing anatomically correct figures, like many artists of that time. Yet his play with light and actions speaks louder, and the distorted proportions add a certain charm and personality to the image. Take, for example, this piece. The Servant Justified is a comical piece that shows a wayward husband pursuing a young servant girl. But in the right-hand corner of the painting, we see a nosy neighbour witnessing the entire scene. The fallen flowers that the servant was collecting signify the innocent maid getting harassed, like a flower dulling and fading, and also, on a luckier note, it shows how the husband’s ministrations are falling apart quickly. According to the Met Museum’s description, the husband invites his wife to create an alibi before the viewer can tattle on him or gossip about him, though there are direct indications of this happening. Other sources say that the neighbour is the one who reports this to his wife before he can recover. He is so lost in his lust that he barely notices the neighbour, but the servant is smart enough to take notice of the spectator. Yet, she cannot stand up for herself. Sarah Maza's book: Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: the Uses of Loyalty (1983) serves as the perfect way to explain why the servant couldn’t stand up to the rakish man. She states that domestic service wasn’t just about earning a livelihood, but a structured system based on unquestioned loyalty and authority between servants and masters, which reflected the social order of the Ancien Régime. While there were the ‘sweet’ moments and framework, the play of power is not something even Maza ignores. She shows the conflict beneath loyalty: the inequality, surveillance, dependence, and punishments that followed under the paternalism of servanthood, which the elites conveniently did not mention and presented as ‘harmonious’. Much like the conflict we can predict this girl is facing. On how to stop, or if she even had the right to stop her Master. Larcent, knowingly or unknowingly, revealed a great, ugly truth behind the world of pristine clothes and dresses, in the prettiest possible way.
The artist used light-hearted humor to depict a severe problem of power and social inequality in France in the 18th century. Although the scene seems funny because the husband is silly enough to chase the servant girl, the subtle details in the picture tell a different story. In particular, the fallen flowers symbolize what happens to many girls in the service when they are harassed by their masters.
Although the girl sees the neighbor’s window, she cannot object to the harassment because her job depends on it. Using bright lighting and figures, the artist exposed the inequality of the upper and lower classes and the vulnerability of female servants.
