Walters Art Museum — Baltimore, MD, USA

The oval is the clue: pictures shaped like this were usually made to fit a panel over a door or a fireplace, ordered as part of the decorating rather than hung on a nail. From what I've read this one came with a companion piece the same size.

According to Wikipedia he spent most of his life in Paris painting rich Americans abroad. His father had made a fortune in sugar, so he had the run of that world rather than having to talk his way into it. Portraits like this were partly a business — you paid to be seen looking like this.

Shepherds and shepherdesses were a craze in France at the time — pastoral plays and operas everywhere, and painters selling the same daydream for the wall. Nobody buying one expected real farm work to look like this. I couldn't find who ordered this particular one.

The candles in this one apparently weren't just decorative — real ones were meant to burn in front of it, so the painted flames would blur together with the real light in a dim room.

By the time this was made, critics had started turning on this sort of thing — Diderot went after it in print, supposedly, for being pretty and false. Buyers carried on wanting it regardless.

There's more than one of these — supposedly a first version came a few years earlier, and the garden behind was added here by an assistant rather than the man whose name is on it. He'd never been anywhere near the world he's painting; it's said the whole scene comes out of travel books and other people's prints, which was normal for this kind of picture.