Lot Essay
Boucher's participation in the revitalization of French landscape painting was one of his signal achievements. As an active and admired History painter -- the Acadmie Royale's highest ranking -- Boucher would bring to the practice of landscape painting a level of prestige and respect that it had not enjoyed in France since the 17th century.
His interest in the French countryside seems to have developed as a result of his contact with Jean-Baptiste Oudry, the Director of the Beauvais tapestry manufactory, who commissioned Boucher in 1734-35 to design the series Ftes Italiennes. He may have joined Oudry's sketching parties in Arcueil and in the areas around Beauvais, where he made a number of studies later worked up in the studio into landscape drawings and paintings remarkable for their fluency of handling. Boucher became something of a specialist in the genre, and by the late 1730s had developed a vision of landscape which he would alter only slightly over the decades, as is evident in the present pendants dating from 1766. Under brilliant blue skies filled with doves and awash in shimmering midday light, two pretty peasant girls -- one holding a baby, the other a fishing rod -- idle by the banks of a river, while a boy gathers water in a bucket beside a stone footbridge. A young mother dries her laundry on the wooden railing of a thatch-roofed mill, while a child and dog look on with curiosity. Profuse with color, activity and picturesque detail, the paintings incorporate motifs which Boucher had studied throughout his diverse career. He combined memories of Italy from his student days in Rome, with studies of the rural landscape made outside Paris; added rustic architecture derived from Watteau's drawings of country cottages near Porcherons; and included figures adapted from Bloemaert, whose drawings of peasants he had etched. Boucher assembled his disparate sources in sweeping decorative arrangements, perfected through years of designing tapestries, and sweetened the whole with touches of pastoral comedy, for which he drew upon his experience as a theatrical designer. Altogether, these elements create an irresistible confection, an idyllic fantasy of country life as entertaining and unreal as the opra comique of Favart. 'As a landscape painter', wrote the urbane Goncourt brothers, 'Boucher's unique preoccupation seems to have been to preserve his generation from the tedium of nature'.
By the later 1750s, the market for landscape paintings by Boucher was near its peak and the genre came to dominate the production of his final decade. He almost always made his later landscapes in pairs, though most have subsequently been separated. In addition to the present paintings, Le Pont and Le Moulin in the Muse du Louvre, Paris, of 1750 (Ananoff, op. cit., 1976 nos. 380-1), The Watermill and The Dovecot of 1750 from the celebrated collection of Bergeret de Grandcourt ibid., nos. 257-8) and the Laundresses by a Cottage and Laundresses by a Mill of 1769 (ibid., nos. 664-5) that were recently sold at Christie's New York (Jan. 12, 1994, lot 51), are among the relatively few original pairs of Boucher's landscapes to have remained together.
A delightful variant copy of Boucher's The Fisher Woman by Hubert Robert (signed and dated 1770) was with Wildenstein in the 1930s (see The Burlington Magazine, March 1938, p. 1). In it, Robert carefully reproduced the figures from Boucher's painting, something he would often do after 1767, when Diderot criticized his figure drawing, and the artist, apparently stung by the attacks, tried to improve his skills by studying the older master's style. Boucher's landscapes would be an ongoing source for Robert, providing him with an exuberant and inviting vision of nature that he could reinterpret for a new generation.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the attribution of the present lot to Boucher.
His interest in the French countryside seems to have developed as a result of his contact with Jean-Baptiste Oudry, the Director of the Beauvais tapestry manufactory, who commissioned Boucher in 1734-35 to design the series Ftes Italiennes. He may have joined Oudry's sketching parties in Arcueil and in the areas around Beauvais, where he made a number of studies later worked up in the studio into landscape drawings and paintings remarkable for their fluency of handling. Boucher became something of a specialist in the genre, and by the late 1730s had developed a vision of landscape which he would alter only slightly over the decades, as is evident in the present pendants dating from 1766. Under brilliant blue skies filled with doves and awash in shimmering midday light, two pretty peasant girls -- one holding a baby, the other a fishing rod -- idle by the banks of a river, while a boy gathers water in a bucket beside a stone footbridge. A young mother dries her laundry on the wooden railing of a thatch-roofed mill, while a child and dog look on with curiosity. Profuse with color, activity and picturesque detail, the paintings incorporate motifs which Boucher had studied throughout his diverse career. He combined memories of Italy from his student days in Rome, with studies of the rural landscape made outside Paris; added rustic architecture derived from Watteau's drawings of country cottages near Porcherons; and included figures adapted from Bloemaert, whose drawings of peasants he had etched. Boucher assembled his disparate sources in sweeping decorative arrangements, perfected through years of designing tapestries, and sweetened the whole with touches of pastoral comedy, for which he drew upon his experience as a theatrical designer. Altogether, these elements create an irresistible confection, an idyllic fantasy of country life as entertaining and unreal as the opra comique of Favart. 'As a landscape painter', wrote the urbane Goncourt brothers, 'Boucher's unique preoccupation seems to have been to preserve his generation from the tedium of nature'.
By the later 1750s, the market for landscape paintings by Boucher was near its peak and the genre came to dominate the production of his final decade. He almost always made his later landscapes in pairs, though most have subsequently been separated. In addition to the present paintings, Le Pont and Le Moulin in the Muse du Louvre, Paris, of 1750 (Ananoff, op. cit., 1976 nos. 380-1), The Watermill and The Dovecot of 1750 from the celebrated collection of Bergeret de Grandcourt ibid., nos. 257-8) and the Laundresses by a Cottage and Laundresses by a Mill of 1769 (ibid., nos. 664-5) that were recently sold at Christie's New York (Jan. 12, 1994, lot 51), are among the relatively few original pairs of Boucher's landscapes to have remained together.
A delightful variant copy of Boucher's The Fisher Woman by Hubert Robert (signed and dated 1770) was with Wildenstein in the 1930s (see The Burlington Magazine, March 1938, p. 1). In it, Robert carefully reproduced the figures from Boucher's painting, something he would often do after 1767, when Diderot criticized his figure drawing, and the artist, apparently stung by the attacks, tried to improve his skills by studying the older master's style. Boucher's landscapes would be an ongoing source for Robert, providing him with an exuberant and inviting vision of nature that he could reinterpret for a new generation.
We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the attribution of the present lot to Boucher.