FRANCOIS BOUCHER
Paris 1703 - Paris 1770

The Enchanted Home: A Pastoral Landscape Surmounted By Cupid

Oil On Canvas: 127 x 109 cm (52.92 x 45.42 in)

“Contemplant des Bergers / la demeure chérie / Je n’ay point de mépris / pour leur rusticité : / Celle que je chéri joint la simplicité / Aux sublimes clartés du /plus vaste Génie. F. Boucher” Verso: three labels reading ‘3544’, ‘541’, and ‘un paisage de Boucher / pour la p… de Mad. / De Tencin / no. 12’

Provenance: Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin ; ? 1749 to her heir Jean Astruc ; Veil-Picard heirs, Paris.

This entrancing work, hitherto unknown to scholars, marks something of a departure for the artist; evidently intended as a decoration, it is painted with a degree of attention that Boucher normally reserved for major commissions of the highest quality. It was, perhaps, the importance of the lady to whom this work is dedicated, identified by Alastair Laing as the brilliant and seductive Mme de Tencin, which inspired Boucher to devote so much attention to this substantial painting, exceptionally placed within a ornate rococo border as if it was set in an imaginary boiserie. There is a chinoiseries enclosed in a painted rococo framework by Boucher (formerly in the Rothschild Collection, in 1915) with a single figure surrounded on a more modest scale than the present work, but this is clearly a more modest decorative work than the present painting. Two other chinoiserie overdoors en camaieu bleu, now divided between the Davids collection, Copenhagen, and that of the Earl of Chichester, have a lighter, decorative rocaille border.

The principal elements repeat those used by the artist several times throughout his career; the colombier (pigeonnier or dove house) appears in at least seven landscape compositions from 1739 onwards (the first being Le Vieux Colombier, Hamburg, Kunsthalle), while the dog is repeated precisely in the Pont of 1751 now in the Louvre. The naked cupid, an appropriate symbol in a work dedicated to lady so practiced in the art of love and who holds aloft the scroll bearing the dedication, can be seen in an identical pose in Apollo Revealing His Divinity to the Shepherdess Issé, signed and dated 1750. The young woman selling eggs, a common sight on the streets of Paris but whose erotic associations would have been immediately recognisable to Mme de Tencin’s sophisticated friends, appears in a drawing engraved by Ingram and is close in pose to the young woman in Frère Luce (Moscow, Pushkin Museum) from 1742. The seated shepherd boy placed in the very centre of the painting, who can be seen in a drawing .., while the distant landscape and brilliant sky with light, scudding clouds, resembles that in the Landscape with Watermill and Temple from 1743 (Barnard Castle, The Bowes Museum). While the subject and provenance are now secure, the painting’s whereabouts since Mme de Tencin’s death in 1749 remains a mystery. Despite its inclusion in the illustrious Veil-Picard collection it nonetheless escaped the attention of scholars until its present startling revelation as a work of the highest quality, a sublime example of this great rococo painter at his most inventive.