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拍品专文
La Cueillette des Cerises ('The Cherry Picker') is among the finest and most appealing of Boucher's paintings from the last years of his career. This large and very loosely painted pastoral has the appearance of an oil sketch, but as Alastair Laing observes, it might well have been made as an independent work to be appreciated in its own right. Certainly, by the late 1760s there was a thriving market for freely handled and improvisational pictures, which younger artists - like Boucher's former pupil, Fragonard - were satisfying. The Cailleux picture has often been considered a study for the large, but indifferently painted version of the subject in the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (170 x 124 cm.), signed and dated 1768 (Fig. 1). The Kenwood picture has as its pendant another pastoral subject, L'Offrande du raisin (Ananoff and Wildenstein, op. cit., no. 652), which is also signed and dated in the same year, but is so different in facture and so much higher in quality that it has led Laing to consider the Kenwood Cueillette des Cerises as a work executed by studio assistants (see A. Laing, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Franois Boucher, 1986, p. 306).
Besides the obvious differences in quality of execution, the Kenwood painting displays a number of variations from the supposed Cailleux sketch: it has only two figures - the boy on the ladder and the girl catching cherries in her apron - and it sets them in a wider landscape; where a pack-mule and goat appear in the sketch, they have been replaced by terracotta pots in the Kenwood decoration, while the exquisite seated girl - perhaps the loveliest invention in the sketch - has been eliminated altogether. Although the Cailleux painting obviously inspired the Kenwood composition, the significant variations between them would be unusual if the one had been intended as a model for the other.
The Cailleux painting did serve, however, as the model for a gouache by Boucher's son-in-law, P.-A. Baudouin, that was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1765 with a pendant depicting Annette et Lubin. Baudouin's pair of gouaches, engraved in color by Nicolas Ponce, were sold in Paris in 1972 (private collection, Quebec; see Ananoff, 1976, op. cit., no. 605/6, for a reproduction), and his La Cueillette des Cerises follows Boucher's picture with only minor variations. Although there is a discrepancy in the recorded dimensions, it is possible that the present painting belonged to Baudouin and figured in the sale of his effects on 15 February 1770. As Laing notes, an ancillary aim for Boucher in making the sketch may have been to supply his son-in-law with a model for his own works. In any event, the appearance of Baudouin's picture in the Salon of 1765 establishes a terminus ante quem for the Cailleux painting, and confirms that it was made a full three years before the picture at Kenwood.
Georges Brunel (op. cit.) recognized an unexpected association - at least indirectly, by way of Ponce's print - between the Cailleux Cueillette des Cerises and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. Though the first volume of his book did not appear until 1782, Rousseau began writing his memoirs in 1765 and he might well have been thinking of Ponce's popular engraving when he recounted an anecdote concerning cherry-picking that is found in Book Four. In it, he tells of wandering along a country road when he was eighteen, and coming upon two girls who were having difficulties crossing a stream. After assisting them, he was invited by one of the girls to join them for lunch at her house. After the meal, the three decided to pick fruit from the garden. 'I climbed the tree,' Rousseau wrote, 'and tossed down bunches of cherries, from which [the girls] returned pips through the branches. The sight of Mlle. Galley with her apron spread out and her head thrust back was very pleasant; I aimed perfectly so that a cluster fell on her breast; how we laughed!'.
Even at the end of his life, Boucher's art remained closely attuned to the ideas and aspirations of his age. His dream of the simple pleasures of country life could be seen mirrored in the pages of the most influential philosopher of the era, and if Boucher's vision of a bucolic idyll is slightly more risqu than Rousseau's - the meaning of the gesture made by the boy in the tree is so obvious as to require no explanation - both exude a cheerful sensuality that can only be described as innocent and healthy. These same qualities seem to be what attracted the younger painter Hubert Robert, the artist who was in some ways Boucher's spiritual successor, to create his own version of Boucher's composition in the early 1770s (Fig. 2).
In a Louis XV carved giltwood frame, with cartouche corners and anthemia centers flanked by trailing foliage and flowers.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Besides the obvious differences in quality of execution, the Kenwood painting displays a number of variations from the supposed Cailleux sketch: it has only two figures - the boy on the ladder and the girl catching cherries in her apron - and it sets them in a wider landscape; where a pack-mule and goat appear in the sketch, they have been replaced by terracotta pots in the Kenwood decoration, while the exquisite seated girl - perhaps the loveliest invention in the sketch - has been eliminated altogether. Although the Cailleux painting obviously inspired the Kenwood composition, the significant variations between them would be unusual if the one had been intended as a model for the other.
The Cailleux painting did serve, however, as the model for a gouache by Boucher's son-in-law, P.-A. Baudouin, that was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1765 with a pendant depicting Annette et Lubin. Baudouin's pair of gouaches, engraved in color by Nicolas Ponce, were sold in Paris in 1972 (private collection, Quebec; see Ananoff, 1976, op. cit., no. 605/6, for a reproduction), and his La Cueillette des Cerises follows Boucher's picture with only minor variations. Although there is a discrepancy in the recorded dimensions, it is possible that the present painting belonged to Baudouin and figured in the sale of his effects on 15 February 1770. As Laing notes, an ancillary aim for Boucher in making the sketch may have been to supply his son-in-law with a model for his own works. In any event, the appearance of Baudouin's picture in the Salon of 1765 establishes a terminus ante quem for the Cailleux painting, and confirms that it was made a full three years before the picture at Kenwood.
Georges Brunel (op. cit.) recognized an unexpected association - at least indirectly, by way of Ponce's print - between the Cailleux Cueillette des Cerises and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions. Though the first volume of his book did not appear until 1782, Rousseau began writing his memoirs in 1765 and he might well have been thinking of Ponce's popular engraving when he recounted an anecdote concerning cherry-picking that is found in Book Four. In it, he tells of wandering along a country road when he was eighteen, and coming upon two girls who were having difficulties crossing a stream. After assisting them, he was invited by one of the girls to join them for lunch at her house. After the meal, the three decided to pick fruit from the garden. 'I climbed the tree,' Rousseau wrote, 'and tossed down bunches of cherries, from which [the girls] returned pips through the branches. The sight of Mlle. Galley with her apron spread out and her head thrust back was very pleasant; I aimed perfectly so that a cluster fell on her breast; how we laughed!'.
Even at the end of his life, Boucher's art remained closely attuned to the ideas and aspirations of his age. His dream of the simple pleasures of country life could be seen mirrored in the pages of the most influential philosopher of the era, and if Boucher's vision of a bucolic idyll is slightly more risqu than Rousseau's - the meaning of the gesture made by the boy in the tree is so obvious as to require no explanation - both exude a cheerful sensuality that can only be described as innocent and healthy. These same qualities seem to be what attracted the younger painter Hubert Robert, the artist who was in some ways Boucher's spiritual successor, to create his own version of Boucher's composition in the early 1770s (Fig. 2).
In a Louis XV carved giltwood frame, with cartouche corners and anthemia centers flanked by trailing foliage and flowers.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.