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Lot Essay
Although the earliest history of this beautiful allegorical painting is unknown, it was certainly made to celebrate the ritual of marriage, perhaps even commissioned to commemorate a particular wedding. In Boucher's painting, a bride clad in traditional white robes and personifying Innocence, sacrifices roses -- symbols of her purity -- upon the altar of love. She is crowned from above with a floral wreath laid upon her head by Hymen, whose torch is lit by Cupid's flame. Beside the bride, a red-cloaked Minerva, goddess of Wisdom (identified by the helmet lying at her side), directs her hand toward the altar, indicating that Reason as well as Passion motivates the young woman's action; Fidelity stands between them, looking on benificently with her attribute, a loyal dog.
The painting, which is signed and dated 1762, exemplifies Boucher's best late-Baroque manner: richly colored and masterfully composed, executed in loaded strokes of creamy pigment, it is a swirl of floating deities, pink-shot clouds and billowing draperies. Yet for all that, the picture exhibits a dignified restraint that is unusual in Boucher's work and hints at the ritualized sobriety that newly fashionable Neoclassical painters such as Joseph-Marie Vien were bringing to depictions of subjects from Antiquity, as Patrice Marandel has noted (op. cit.). Although Boucher was unperturbed by the criticisms leveled at his work in the 1760s and refused to pander to the anti-rococo backlash expressed in the Salon critiques of Diderot, he was not oblivious to the changing tastes of patrons and the public. One senses that in The Allegory of Marriage, the 60-year-old artist was responding creatively and personally to the new direction in which French art was heading. Fragonard would take up the same subject more than a decade later in The Sacrifice of Love (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Stewart Resnick, Los Angeles), his own challenge to the new style, in which he countered Neoclassical clarity with a dark and sulphurous sensuality. In The Allegory of Marriage, the ever cheerful and robust Boucher would demonstrate that his inventiveness was undiminished by age and his virtuosity unsurpassed by the works of either his contemporaries or juniors.
Alexandre Ananoff was mistaken in associating the present painting with a somewhat smaller Venus and Cupid sold from the estate of the Duc des Deux-Ponts in 1778, and with a grisaille that appeared in the De Ghendt sale in 1779, though the recorded subject of the latter corresponds to that of the present painting; perhaps, as Alastair Laing has suggested (written communication dated 5 January 2000), the lost Ghendt grisaille served as a modello for the Lagerfeld Allegory of Marriage. A drawing of a standing woman holding flowers in her apron which Ananoff associated with the painting (op. cit., no. 565/1, fig. 1536) was sold at Christie's, New York (14 January 1992, lot 124); although the pose of the figure differs considerably from that of Innocence in the final painting, Laing (written communication) also believes it to be a preliminary study for her figure.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the attribution of the painting to Boucher and providing information which forms the basis for the above entry.
The painting, which is signed and dated 1762, exemplifies Boucher's best late-Baroque manner: richly colored and masterfully composed, executed in loaded strokes of creamy pigment, it is a swirl of floating deities, pink-shot clouds and billowing draperies. Yet for all that, the picture exhibits a dignified restraint that is unusual in Boucher's work and hints at the ritualized sobriety that newly fashionable Neoclassical painters such as Joseph-Marie Vien were bringing to depictions of subjects from Antiquity, as Patrice Marandel has noted (op. cit.). Although Boucher was unperturbed by the criticisms leveled at his work in the 1760s and refused to pander to the anti-rococo backlash expressed in the Salon critiques of Diderot, he was not oblivious to the changing tastes of patrons and the public. One senses that in The Allegory of Marriage, the 60-year-old artist was responding creatively and personally to the new direction in which French art was heading. Fragonard would take up the same subject more than a decade later in The Sacrifice of Love (Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Stewart Resnick, Los Angeles), his own challenge to the new style, in which he countered Neoclassical clarity with a dark and sulphurous sensuality. In The Allegory of Marriage, the ever cheerful and robust Boucher would demonstrate that his inventiveness was undiminished by age and his virtuosity unsurpassed by the works of either his contemporaries or juniors.
Alexandre Ananoff was mistaken in associating the present painting with a somewhat smaller Venus and Cupid sold from the estate of the Duc des Deux-Ponts in 1778, and with a grisaille that appeared in the De Ghendt sale in 1779, though the recorded subject of the latter corresponds to that of the present painting; perhaps, as Alastair Laing has suggested (written communication dated 5 January 2000), the lost Ghendt grisaille served as a modello for the Lagerfeld Allegory of Marriage. A drawing of a standing woman holding flowers in her apron which Ananoff associated with the painting (op. cit., no. 565/1, fig. 1536) was sold at Christie's, New York (14 January 1992, lot 124); although the pose of the figure differs considerably from that of Innocence in the final painting, Laing (written communication) also believes it to be a preliminary study for her figure.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the attribution of the painting to Boucher and providing information which forms the basis for the above entry.