Lot Essay
Alastair Laing has kindly confirmed the attribution, and notes that this is a development from rather than an initial study for a figure in Boucher's La Pipée aux Oiseaux, signed and dated 1748. That picture, now in the Getty Museum, served as a model for the right-hand section of the fourth tapestry in a cycle of six entitled La Noble Pastorale, woven by the Beauvais factory in 1749, A. Ananoff, François Boucher, II, Paris, 1976, p. 21, fig. 324a).