L'amour vendangeur

细节

François Boucher (Paris 1703-1770)
L'amour vendangeur
signed '.Boucher' (lower center)
oil on canvas, oval
40½ x 34¾ in. (102.9 x 88.3 cm.)

来源

Possibly François Derbais, rue Poissonniere, Paris, until 1743.
Vincent Four; Le Havre, 19 August 1889, lot 27.
Anonymous sale; Palais Galliéra, Paris, 7 June 1974, lot 12.

出版

E. and J. de Goncourt, L'art du dix-huitième siècle, Paris, 1880-2, I, p. 189.
A. Michel, François Boucher, Paris, 1889, p. 32.
P. de Nolhac, François Boucher: premier peintre du roi, 1703-1770, Paris, 1907.
P. de Nolhac, Boucher, premier peintre du roi, Paris, 1925, p. 24. A. Ananoff, François Boucher, Lausanne, 1976, II, p. 199, no. 65, fig. 302.
P. Jean-Richard, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins Ecole française. I. L'Oeuvre grave de François Boucher dans la Collection Edmond de Rothschild. Paris, 1978, under no. 962, p. 246.
A. Ananoff & D. Wildenstein, L'opera completa di Boucher, Milan, 1980, no. 65, color plate III.
A. Laing in exhib. cat. François Boucher 1703-1770, New York/Detroit/Paris, 1986-7, under no. 15, p. 128.

拍品专文

The present canvas dates from the early 1730s, almost certainly shortly after his return from Italy. It relates to - and indeed may have been a part of - a set of four putti paintings made for his first important Parisian patron, the obscure lawyer François Derbais. Boucher had painted his first large-scale masterpieces in the early 1730s for the billiards room in Derbais' townhouse on the rue Poissoniere: a suite of mythological compositions including the Rape of Europa and Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs of Nyssa (now in the Wallace Collection London), Venus Requesting Arms for Aeneas (Musée du Louvre, Paris) and Aurora and Cephalus (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nancy), and the Birth of Venus (Romanian Embassy, Paris). Around the same time or immediately thereafter, he made four decorations of frolicking putti representing the Seasons for Derbais' staircase: L'amour moissonneur (an autograph version, perhaps the original, is in the Blaffer Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), L'amour oiseleur (private collection), L'amour nageur (an autograph version, perhaps the original, is in the James de Rothschild collection, Waddesdon Manor) and the present L'amour vendangeur. All four were engraved and identified as belonging to Derbais, and two of the engravings were announced in the Mercure de France in October 1734.

Despite Boucher's characteristic fascination with the appearance and movements of actual babies (which he carefully studied his whole life), the subject of L'amour vendangeur ('Love the Grape Harvester') is evocative of bacchanalian imagery from ancient art and poetry. It associates Love (in the guise of cupid) with wine-making or drink, and would have served to represent Autumn in the set of seasonal allegories. The present painting is signed by Boucher and corresponds to Etienne Fessard's engraving of Derbais's L'amour vendangeur (announced in the Mercure in 1741) in every significant detail but one: the print, like the other surviving paintings from the series, is in an upright rectangular format, while the present canvas is oval. Although it seems likely that it has been cut to make it oval, this cannot be proven and it is possible, as Alastair Laing believes (written communication, 6 September 2005), that the present painting is an autograph replica based on a lost original.

We are grateful to Alastair Laing for his assistance with this entry.