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In this, the first of Lancret’s Four Times of Day, a priest attends a young lady as she takes her breakfast and gets dressed. The clock records the time as 9.08 am. The young woman, her breast exposed, has turned away from her dressing table to pour hot water into the priest’s teacup. As the pair look directly at each other, the priest risks his hand being scalded – perhaps a visual metaphor for the risk to his soul. Lancret leaves unanswered the question of why there are two spare cups on the table, but the sense that visitors might arrive adds a frisson to the scene.

The second scene of Hogarth’s ‘A Harlot’s Progress’ may have inspired Lancret. Hogarth possibly repaid Lancret’s compliment in The Toilette, one of his six pictures from Marriage A-la-Mode (also in The National Gallery’s collection), in which the lawyer Silvertongue, wearing a wig and costume similar to those of Lancret’s cleric, pays court to the Countess.