GENERAL DESCRIPTION
This is a rare example of an early landscape by Boucher, the painter whose style of painting is synonymous with the French rococo. The son of an obscure guild painter, little is known of Boucher's artistic development. He is recorded as having studied for a brief period with Francois Lemoyne, one of the most successful painters of the previous generation, who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. In tonality and technique, this early work most closely relates to the Flemish tradition of landscape painting, despite the Italianate architecture in the far distance. Boucher's uncanny ease with the brush earned him a faithful clientele among the newly moneyed aristocracy of France and northern Europe, including the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, the powerful favorite of Louis XV.
Most celebrated for his idyllic pastorals, peopled by impossibly elegant "peasants," captured at moments of flirtatious exchange, Boucher's mastery of landscape painting is an under appreciated aspect of his art. Even in this youthful work, the artist's legendary facility of composition and brushwork is everywhere apparent. Although clearly an invention of the imagination, Boucher's close observation of nature still informs each landscape element. And yet, inserted into this vision of perfected nature is the trademark artifice of Boucher's gentle shepherdess. With her unblemished complexion and decorous seat, astride her rather unbelievable steed, she is the forerunner of the heroines of Boucher's later pastorals, in which the figures seem to have stepped straight off the stage of the Cornedie Italienne. Boucher's gracious "peasants" are always far removed from the harsh existence of the actual peasantry in 18th-century France or Italy. Paintings like this one would later provide the pictorial inspiration for Marie Antoinette in her equally artificial recreation of farm-life at Versailles, where she could playact the role of Boucher's simple shepherdess, freed, at least temporarily, from her royal responsibilities as Queen of France.
Adapted from
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 30-31.
NOTES
Checked Piction
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
A woman on horseback herds a flock of cattle and sheep across a small bridge over a calm river. A barefoot shepherd playing a woodwind follows behind them. Known as a "pastoral," Francois Boucher's painting presents an imaginary world that is simple, carefree, and delightful. The serene life of the shepherds Boucher painted was meant to evoke a world close to nature. For 18th-century art collectors, these idyllic landscapes were designed to rouse nostalgic emotions, offering an escape to an imaginary, lost world.
no author or text source shown in TMS. Copy found in education file with T43007.43 on tombstone and it included the line indicated in purple above.
When I added the other three labels found in the Rosenberg Collection file in the education files, I explained the author and date with the following (adjusted for this object number):
This label was found in the education file for the Rosenberg Collection. The hardcopy did not indicate a date or author but it included T43007.43 as the number for this object. Additional labels were included (1989.135.FA, 1990.144.FA and 1990.145.FA). The last of these appears in TMS as having been written by heather MacDonald, November 2009. This author date has been applied to all four label texts.
Francois Boucher (1703-1770)
A Landscape with Distant
Buildings and a Herdswoman
with Cattle and Sheep Crossing
a River
1731
Oil on canvas
Full text from General Description:
This is a rare example of an early landscape by Boucher, the painter whose style of painting is synonymous with the French rococo. The son of an obscure guild painter, little is known of Boucher's artistic development. He is recorded as having studied for a brief period with Francois Lemoyne, one of the most successful painters of the previous generation, who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. A comparison between Boucher's mature figural work and Lemoyne's sensuous Bather (also, Michael L. Rosenberg Collection, located in the next room) attests to Lemoyne's influence on the precocious Boucher, despite the latter's denial late in life of any artistic indebtedness to the older painter. However, it is true that, unlike Lemoyne, whose choice of subject matter and manner of painting were consistently dependent on Italian precedents, Boucher seems to have experimented with a variety of models. In tonality and technique, this early work most closely relates to the Flemish tradition of landscape painting, despite the Italianate architecture in the far distance. Boucher's uncanny ease with the brush earned him a faithful clientele among the newly moneyed aristocracy of France and northern Europe, including the patronage ofMadame de Pompadour, the powerful favorite of Louis XV.
Most celebrated for his idyllic pastorals, peopled by impossibly elegant 'peasants,' captured at moments of flirtatious exchange, Boucher's mastery oflandscape painting is an under appreciated aspect of his art. Even in this youthful work, the artist's legendary facility of composition and brushwork is everywhere apparent. Although clearly an invention of the imagination, Boucher's close observation of nature still informs each
landscape element. And yet, inserted into this vision of perfected nature is the trademark artifice of Boucher's gentle shepherdess. With her unblemished complexion and decorous seat, astride her rather unbelievable steed, she is the forerunner of the heroines of Boucher's later pastorals, in which the figures seem to have stepped straight off the stage of the Cornedie Italienne. Boucher's gracious "peasants" are always far removed from the harsh existence of the actual peasantry in 18th-century France or Italy. Paintings like this one would later provide the pictorial inspiration for Marie Antoinette in her equally artificial recreation of farm-life at Versailles, where she could playact the role of Boucher's simple shepherdess, freed, at least temporarily, from her royal responsibilities as Queen of France.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 30-31.
BOUCHER:
An exquisite painting by Boucher, made fairly early in his career, perhaps when he was in Rome, shows a little shepherd boy and cowherd directing their cattle homeward through a very picturesque, but purely imaginary, landscape toward an exotic kind of Italianate city in the distance (see fig. 76, p. 104). This work’s picturesque quality is in the tradition of Lemoyne. It’s about painting: it serves as a painting of the descriptive qualities of paint. There’s no high moral subject. Boucher greatly admired the Italian seventeenth-century painter Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, who specialized in such kinds of subjects, but Boucher handled it in a much more delicate and lighthearted manner. This landscape is one of the really charming works in Mr. Rosenberg’s collection. (19-20)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
At the time of Pater’s death in 1736, the gallant genre, the new exploration of narrative, and illustration had reached a point where the young François Boucher could pick them up. Like Pater, Boucher had learned directly from Watteau’s work, but in a very different way. Too young to be in close personal contact with Watteau, he became one of the major contributors to the Recueil Jullienne in the mid-1720s. As an engraver, he was familiar with Watteau’s work like no other artist of his generation. In one of his first royal commissions, the series of exotic hunt scenes, or Chasses exotiques, for the Petits Appartements of Louis XV in Versailles, he collaborated on the same cycle with Pater right before the latter’s death. Boucher’s role goes far beyond these coincidences of chronology. One can see references to Pater’s illustrative work in Boucher’s own illustrations, but the link to Pater’s fêtes galantes is even closer. While Boucher, in the first years after his stay in Italy from 1728–31, aimed to become a history painter, he developed a new generation of pastorals as a parallel endeavor, modernizing Watteau’s invention and Pater’s adaptation of it. These pastorals turned out to be a major part of his oeuvre for the rest of his life and became popular with collectors and patrons. The Gallant Shepherd (Le Pasteur galant), painted for the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris around 1738, demonstrates how the fête galante reached a new level with Boucher.32 Boucher reworked Watteau’s genre toward a pastoral elegance and emphasized the Italian element. His figures are elegant shepherds rather than members of the jeunesse dorée; the imaginary character of the fête galante has been considerably strengthened.
Christoph Martin Vogtherr, "Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fête Galante," 81-94, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Now, having taken a number of paintings and drawings by Boucher to suggest what he did before, in, and after Rome, it is time to address ourselves to Michael Rosenberg’s Landscape with Distant Buildings and a Herdswoman (fig. 76).39
It has elements that associate it with many of the paintings done before he went to Italy: the pastoral theme, the twisting but now less agitated trees, the cattle and sheep, and the Campagnolesque or Watteauesque buildings visible beyond an arched bridge at the upper right. But there are also novel, and even more pronouncedly Italianate, features: the cap and general dress of the piping herdsman and, above all, the city wall and the sun-drenched city itself in the distance to the left. No building is individually identifiable, any more than in the painting with a distant city view in Siena, but whereas the buildings in the Siena painting seem real, here they are unmistakably ideal; together they convey a feel of the mingled structures of ancient, medieval, and Baroque Rome. These buildings and an Italian pifferaro, or flute player, are obviously things that there was no point in serving up to members of a Roman public, for whom they would have been commonplace, and who would almost certainly have preferred something with a much more Northern flavor. They instead denote the picture as one of those—probably, in view of its freshness, one of the very first of those—executed by Boucher after his return to France in 1731. And it was a vein that he was to go on exploiting for half a dozen years or so after his return. Only with the landscape overdoor that he painted for the Hôtel du Soubise in 1738 or 1739 did the flavor of his landscapes become unmistakably French.40
Excerpt from
Alastair Laing, "Artist in a Garret: The Young Boucher in Rome," 95-108, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
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Place of origin: France (nation): TGN: 1000070
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c. 1731
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- The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles~Learn more about the life and works of Boucher.
- Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth~Read about the 2004 exhibition Genius of the French Rococo: The Drawings of Franҫois Boucher and Boucher's Mythological Paintings: The Last Great Series Reunited.
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General Description
This is a rare example of an early landscape by Boucher, the painter whose style of painting is synonymous with the French rococo. The son of an obscure guild painter, little is known of Boucher's artistic development. He is recorded as having studied for a brief period with Francois Lemoyne, one of the most successful painters of the previous generation, who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. In tonality and technique, this early work most closely relates to the Flemish tradition of landscape painting, despite the Italianate architecture in the far distance. Boucher's uncanny ease with the brush earned him a faithful clientele among the newly moneyed aristocracy of France and northern Europe, including the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, the powerful favorite of Louis XV.
Most celebrated for his idyllic pastorals, peopled by impossibly elegant "peasants," captured at moments of flirtatious exchange, Boucher's mastery of landscape painting is an under appreciated aspect of his art. Even in this youthful work, the artist's legendary facility of composition and brushwork is everywhere apparent. Although clearly an invention of the imagination, Boucher's close observation of nature still informs each landscape element. And yet, inserted into this vision of perfected nature is the trademark artifice of Boucher's gentle shepherdess. With her unblemished complexion and decorous seat, astride her rather unbelievable steed, she is the forerunner of the heroines of Boucher's later pastorals, in which the figures seem to have stepped straight off the stage of the Cornedie Italienne. Boucher's gracious "peasants" are always far removed from the harsh existence of the actual peasantry in 18th-century France or Italy. Paintings like this one would later provide the pictorial inspiration for Marie Antoinette in her equally artificial recreation of farm-life at Versailles, where she could playact the role of Boucher's simple shepherdess, freed, at least temporarily, from her royal responsibilities as Queen of France.
Adapted from
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 30-31.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
- The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles~Learn more about the life and works of Boucher.
- Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth~Read about the 2004 exhibition Genius of the French Rococo: The Drawings of Franҫois Boucher and Boucher's Mythological Paintings: The Last Great Series Reunited.
Notes
Checked Piction
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
A woman on horseback herds a flock of cattle and sheep across a small bridge over a calm river. A barefoot shepherd playing a woodwind follows behind them. Known as a "pastoral," Francois Boucher's painting presents an imaginary world that is simple, carefree, and delightful. The serene life of the shepherds Boucher painted was meant to evoke a world close to nature. For 18th-century art collectors, these idyllic landscapes were designed to rouse nostalgic emotions, offering an escape to an imaginary, lost world.
no author or text source shown in TMS. Copy found in education file with T43007.43 on tombstone and it included the line indicated in purple above.
When I added the other three labels found in the Rosenberg Collection file in the education files, I explained the author and date with the following (adjusted for this object number):
This label was found in the education file for the Rosenberg Collection. The hardcopy did not indicate a date or author but it included T43007.43 as the number for this object. Additional labels were included (1989.135.FA, 1990.144.FA and 1990.145.FA). The last of these appears in TMS as having been written by heather MacDonald, November 2009. This author date has been applied to all four label texts.
Francois Boucher (1703-1770)
A Landscape with Distant
Buildings and a Herdswoman
with Cattle and Sheep Crossing
a River
1731
Oil on canvas
Full text from General Description:
This is a rare example of an early landscape by Boucher, the painter whose style of painting is synonymous with the French rococo. The son of an obscure guild painter, little is known of Boucher's artistic development. He is recorded as having studied for a brief period with Francois Lemoyne, one of the most successful painters of the previous generation, who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. A comparison between Boucher's mature figural work and Lemoyne's sensuous Bather (also, Michael L. Rosenberg Collection, located in the next room) attests to Lemoyne's influence on the precocious Boucher, despite the latter's denial late in life of any artistic indebtedness to the older painter. However, it is true that, unlike Lemoyne, whose choice of subject matter and manner of painting were consistently dependent on Italian precedents, Boucher seems to have experimented with a variety of models. In tonality and technique, this early work most closely relates to the Flemish tradition of landscape painting, despite the Italianate architecture in the far distance. Boucher's uncanny ease with the brush earned him a faithful clientele among the newly moneyed aristocracy of France and northern Europe, including the patronage ofMadame de Pompadour, the powerful favorite of Louis XV.
Most celebrated for his idyllic pastorals, peopled by impossibly elegant 'peasants,' captured at moments of flirtatious exchange, Boucher's mastery oflandscape painting is an under appreciated aspect of his art. Even in this youthful work, the artist's legendary facility of composition and brushwork is everywhere apparent. Although clearly an invention of the imagination, Boucher's close observation of nature still informs each
landscape element. And yet, inserted into this vision of perfected nature is the trademark artifice of Boucher's gentle shepherdess. With her unblemished complexion and decorous seat, astride her rather unbelievable steed, she is the forerunner of the heroines of Boucher's later pastorals, in which the figures seem to have stepped straight off the stage of the Cornedie Italienne. Boucher's gracious "peasants" are always far removed from the harsh existence of the actual peasantry in 18th-century France or Italy. Paintings like this one would later provide the pictorial inspiration for Marie Antoinette in her equally artificial recreation of farm-life at Versailles, where she could playact the role of Boucher's simple shepherdess, freed, at least temporarily, from her royal responsibilities as Queen of France.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 30-31.
BOUCHER:
An exquisite painting by Boucher, made fairly early in his career, perhaps when he was in Rome, shows a little shepherd boy and cowherd directing their cattle homeward through a very picturesque, but purely imaginary, landscape toward an exotic kind of Italianate city in the distance (see fig. 76, p. 104). This work’s picturesque quality is in the tradition of Lemoyne. It’s about painting: it serves as a painting of the descriptive qualities of paint. There’s no high moral subject. Boucher greatly admired the Italian seventeenth-century painter Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, who specialized in such kinds of subjects, but Boucher handled it in a much more delicate and lighthearted manner. This landscape is one of the really charming works in Mr. Rosenberg’s collection. (19-20)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
At the time of Pater’s death in 1736, the gallant genre, the new exploration of narrative, and illustration had reached a point where the young François Boucher could pick them up. Like Pater, Boucher had learned directly from Watteau’s work, but in a very different way. Too young to be in close personal contact with Watteau, he became one of the major contributors to the Recueil Jullienne in the mid-1720s. As an engraver, he was familiar with Watteau’s work like no other artist of his generation. In one of his first royal commissions, the series of exotic hunt scenes, or Chasses exotiques, for the Petits Appartements of Louis XV in Versailles, he collaborated on the same cycle with Pater right before the latter’s death. Boucher’s role goes far beyond these coincidences of chronology. One can see references to Pater’s illustrative work in Boucher’s own illustrations, but the link to Pater’s fêtes galantes is even closer. While Boucher, in the first years after his stay in Italy from 1728–31, aimed to become a history painter, he developed a new generation of pastorals as a parallel endeavor, modernizing Watteau’s invention and Pater’s adaptation of it. These pastorals turned out to be a major part of his oeuvre for the rest of his life and became popular with collectors and patrons. The Gallant Shepherd (Le Pasteur galant), painted for the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris around 1738, demonstrates how the fête galante reached a new level with Boucher.32 Boucher reworked Watteau’s genre toward a pastoral elegance and emphasized the Italian element. His figures are elegant shepherds rather than members of the jeunesse dorée; the imaginary character of the fête galante has been considerably strengthened.
Christoph Martin Vogtherr, "Moving on from Watteau: Jean-Baptiste Pater and the Transformation of the Fête Galante," 81-94, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Now, having taken a number of paintings and drawings by Boucher to suggest what he did before, in, and after Rome, it is time to address ourselves to Michael Rosenberg’s Landscape with Distant Buildings and a Herdswoman (fig. 76).39
It has elements that associate it with many of the paintings done before he went to Italy: the pastoral theme, the twisting but now less agitated trees, the cattle and sheep, and the Campagnolesque or Watteauesque buildings visible beyond an arched bridge at the upper right. But there are also novel, and even more pronouncedly Italianate, features: the cap and general dress of the piping herdsman and, above all, the city wall and the sun-drenched city itself in the distance to the left. No building is individually identifiable, any more than in the painting with a distant city view in Siena, but whereas the buildings in the Siena painting seem real, here they are unmistakably ideal; together they convey a feel of the mingled structures of ancient, medieval, and Baroque Rome. These buildings and an Italian pifferaro, or flute player, are obviously things that there was no point in serving up to members of a Roman public, for whom they would have been commonplace, and who would almost certainly have preferred something with a much more Northern flavor. They instead denote the picture as one of those—probably, in view of its freshness, one of the very first of those—executed by Boucher after his return to France in 1731. And it was a vein that he was to go on exploiting for half a dozen years or so after his return. Only with the landscape overdoor that he painted for the Hôtel du Soubise in 1738 or 1739 did the flavor of his landscapes become unmistakably French.40
Excerpt from
Alastair Laing, "Artist in a Garret: The Young Boucher in Rome," 95-108, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Place of origin: France (nation): TGN: 1000070
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1731
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
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