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Lot Essay
Little is known of Boucher’s activities during his years in Rome (1728-1731). He won the Prix de Rome in 1723, which should have guaranteed him a three-year scholarship to the French Academy, but funding for his trip and a space for him at the Academy were not immediately available, so he delayed his journey to Italy by five years, when he could pay for his own travel. Boucher later claimed to have been little impressed with his exposure to the works of Michelangelo, Raphael or the classical antiquities of Rome, and instead studied the baroque artists for whom he had greater sympathy, including Albani, Pietro da Cortona and Castiglione. He supported himself making paintings for the market, almost certainly bambochades and rural subjects, such as the present painting, which were then fashionable and associated by Italian collectors with the northern manner.
La Ferme is one of the most charming and bravura of the small handful the paintings that can be identified with reasonable certainty as having been made by Boucher during his time in Rome. The painting is small in scale and executed with such quick, fa presto brushwork – indeed, it was catalogued as une esquisse when it was sold in Paris in 1778 – that we are little surprised that for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the picture was misattributed to Boucher’s most celebrated pupil, Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The painting was regularly published as by Fragonard by such eminent connoisseurs as Roger Portalis and Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, and it appears to have belonged to Hippolyte Walferdin, whose collection of Fragonard’s works was the greatest and most discerning ever assembled. Although Alastair Laing questioned the attribution in his 1986 catalogue François Boucher, 1703-1770 (op. cit.), he now believes the picture to be an autograph work.
That La Ferme is indisputably by Boucher is confirmed by a thumbnail sketch of the picture by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin in his annotated catalogue of the sale of the painter Charles Natoire in 1778, as well as by the precise description of it provided there. Natoire was an almost exact contemporary of Boucher and was a student at the French Academy in Rome – later he would become its Director – when Boucher was also resident in the city. By the time of his death, Natoire owned many works by friends and pupils (including four paintings by Fragonard), given to him or traded with him over the course of his career, and we can presume that he acquired La Ferme from Boucher soon after it was completed; there can be little doubt that the painting was made sometime between 1728, when Boucher arrived in Rome, and 1730, when Natoire departed on his return journey to France.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
La Ferme is one of the most charming and bravura of the small handful the paintings that can be identified with reasonable certainty as having been made by Boucher during his time in Rome. The painting is small in scale and executed with such quick, fa presto brushwork – indeed, it was catalogued as une esquisse when it was sold in Paris in 1778 – that we are little surprised that for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the picture was misattributed to Boucher’s most celebrated pupil, Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The painting was regularly published as by Fragonard by such eminent connoisseurs as Roger Portalis and Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, and it appears to have belonged to Hippolyte Walferdin, whose collection of Fragonard’s works was the greatest and most discerning ever assembled. Although Alastair Laing questioned the attribution in his 1986 catalogue François Boucher, 1703-1770 (op. cit.), he now believes the picture to be an autograph work.
That La Ferme is indisputably by Boucher is confirmed by a thumbnail sketch of the picture by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin in his annotated catalogue of the sale of the painter Charles Natoire in 1778, as well as by the precise description of it provided there. Natoire was an almost exact contemporary of Boucher and was a student at the French Academy in Rome – later he would become its Director – when Boucher was also resident in the city. By the time of his death, Natoire owned many works by friends and pupils (including four paintings by Fragonard), given to him or traded with him over the course of his career, and we can presume that he acquired La Ferme from Boucher soon after it was completed; there can be little doubt that the painting was made sometime between 1728, when Boucher arrived in Rome, and 1730, when Natoire departed on his return journey to France.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.