Catalogue-2014-Jean-Luc-Baroni

François Boucher
Paris 1703-1770
12
Le Peintre de Paysage (The Landscape Painter)
Oil on canvas. Monogrammed on the bench: f. B
39 x 30 cms. (15 ¼ x 11 ¾ in.)
Provenance: Collection Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, his posthumous sale, 10 th August 1778, lot 18, 1220
pounds, sold together with its apparent pendant, Le sculpteur dans son atelier, in fact by Jean Baptiste
Marie Pierre; Pierre-Hippolyte Lemoyne, architect, his sale, 19 th May 1828, lot 74, 120 francs; Comte de
Pourtalès-Gorgier, his posthumous sale, 27 th March-4 h April 1865, lot 228, 7.000 francs; S.E. Khalil-Bey,
his sale, 16 h -18 h January 1868, n°72, 14.000 francs; A. Hulot, his sale G.G.P., 9 h -10 h May 1892, lot 80,
25.000 francs; Baron Edmond de Rothschild, Château de Prégny.
Exhibited: L’Art au XVIIIe siècle, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 1883-1884, cat 17, collection de Mr Hulot.
Literature: Ed. and J. de Goncourt, L’Art du XVIIIe siècle, Paris, 1880, Vol. I, third edition, p.199, “Vte
Collet”; A. Michel, François Boucher, “Les Artistes célèbres”, Paris, 1889, p.96; G. Kahn, Boucher,
Biographie critique, Paris, 1904, rep. p.44 (with location mistakenly given as the Louvre); A. Michel,
François Boucher, catalogue by L. Suillé and Ch. Masson, Paris, 1906, cat. 1129 et 1230; P. de Nolhac,
François Boucher, catalogue by Georges Pannier, Goupil & Cie, Paris, 1907, p.37, ill. opp. p.10, cat.
p.143; H. MacFall, “Boucher, the man, his time, his art and his significance 1703-1770”, The Connoisseur,
special edition, 1908, ill. p.144; P. de Nolhac, Boucher, premier peintre du roi, Paris, 1925, p.76, ill. opp.
p.76; A. Ananoff, “Attributions et identifications nouvelles de quelques dessins de François Boucher et de
Gabriel de Saint Aubin”, (communication of 16 octobre 1965) Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de l’Art
français, 1965, pp. 175-176; Regina Shoolman Slatkin, François Boucher in North American Collections,
100 Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington and Chicago, 1974, under cat.33; A. Ananoff, François
Boucher, Lausanne, 1976, vol.I, p. 209, cat.76, fig.338 (as by Boucher and Pierre); exhibition catalogue,
François Boucher 1703-1770, Paris, New York and Detroit, 1986-1987, under cat. 22, pp.150-151.
Described in the Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne sale as “un joli morceau
plein de gaîté et d’agrément”, this remarkable canvas depicts a
painter’s studio, one which the Goncourts, André Michel and
Nolhac were all pleased to describe as Boucher’s own, with the
artist dressed “in a dressing gown and cotton cap à la Chardin,
seated in front of an easel, with all the clutter of work around him,
his wife, a child in arms, looking over his shoulder and two young
boys, one mixing colours and the other holding a portfolio” 1 . The
1828 sale catalogue of the architect Pierre-Hippolyte Lemoyne
had first proposed an autobiographical interpretation of the
canvas: “the painter is François Boucher himself; the young
pupil is Deshays …..the young woman is madame Boucher”,
though this had been absent from the sale following the death
of his father Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne in 1778 and Ananoff much
later demonstrated that the age alone of the figures depicted
precluded this delightful but fantastic description from being an
accurate one.
1. François Boucher, Study: Head of a
Child and Two Hands, formerly in
the J.P. Heseltine Collection.
A tour de force of brushwork, concentrated onto a diminutive
canvas, the picture demonstrates the exuberance of Boucher’s
technique at this relatively early point in his career. Ananoff’s
erroneous suggestion that it was the work of two hands, Boucher
42