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Lot Essay
François Boucher was a prolific draftsman; he himself claimed to have made ten thousand drawings in the course of his career. The figure might seem exaggerated, but the artist was active for fifty years and a large number of drawings, about thirty-five hundred, are recorded today (A. Laing, Boucher’s Drawings. Who and What Were they For?, New York, 2015, p. 9). Boucher’s representations of children in painting, drawing, porcelain, and tapestries are numerous and they were already a phenomenon in the eighteenth century. These designs were known as ‘Les Enfants de Boucher’.
Within the category of drawings of children it is possible to distinguish roughly two broad typologies: sheets representing naked putti and cupids at play (these studies were often engraved and illustrated in collections by Huquier the Younger, Louis-Félix de la Rue, and Pierre Aveline), and drawings with older children, boys and girls, captured in scenes of daily life or in pastoral settings, as on the present sheet. Highly finished drawings like this one were created as independent works of art and were produced in quite large numbers by the artist for collectors. In the 1906 catalogue by Soullié and Masson numerous drawings in black chalk on blue paper with similar themes are listed (see Soullié and Masson, op. cit.). Boucher concentrated on the depiction of children more often towards the end of his life, probably in part to respond to the taste of his patron, Madame de Pompadour, for such representations (A. Laing, The Drawings of Boucher, New York, 2003, p. 148).
In 2019 Alastair Laing confirmed the attribution of this drawing on the basis of a photograph. The scholar suggested that a pupil might have completed the drawing in some areas such as in the figure of the girl and of the dog.
Within the category of drawings of children it is possible to distinguish roughly two broad typologies: sheets representing naked putti and cupids at play (these studies were often engraved and illustrated in collections by Huquier the Younger, Louis-Félix de la Rue, and Pierre Aveline), and drawings with older children, boys and girls, captured in scenes of daily life or in pastoral settings, as on the present sheet. Highly finished drawings like this one were created as independent works of art and were produced in quite large numbers by the artist for collectors. In the 1906 catalogue by Soullié and Masson numerous drawings in black chalk on blue paper with similar themes are listed (see Soullié and Masson, op. cit.). Boucher concentrated on the depiction of children more often towards the end of his life, probably in part to respond to the taste of his patron, Madame de Pompadour, for such representations (A. Laing, The Drawings of Boucher, New York, 2003, p. 148).
In 2019 Alastair Laing confirmed the attribution of this drawing on the basis of a photograph. The scholar suggested that a pupil might have completed the drawing in some areas such as in the figure of the girl and of the dog.