An Autumn Pastoral

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An Autumn Pastoral: Francois Boucher

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Francois Boucher Oil Painting - An Autumn Pastoral

Keywords: Autumn, Pastoral

Work Overview: An Autumn Pastoral
Francois Boucher
Date: 1749
Style: Rococo
Genre: pastorale
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 259.5 x 198.6 cm
Wallace Collection, London

Boucher's pastorals and landscape paintings, which are certainly part of his rococo achievement, are willfully artificial on a basis of real observation. They create a new branch of rococo art in which the growing tendency to shake off dynastic and mythological duties has been completely developed.

This painting and its companion piece, A Summer Pastoral (also in the Wallace Collection), were commissioned by the financier Trudaine for his new château at Montigny-Lencoup, together with four overdoors by Oudry which are also in the Wallace Collection.

These great pastorals offer a characteristic Boucher blend of elegance and ruticity.

With its pendant, P482, the painting is one of Boucher’s most ambitious works in the pastoral mode. Boucher continued the pastoral, utopian mode of Watteau's Fêtes galantes, anchoring them more clearly in an idealised, Italian setting. By exchanging Watteau's contemporary Parisians with idealised shepherds and shjepherdesses, he further removed the scenes from a recognizable contemporary reality, transposing them into an entirely imaginary world. While Watteau produced cabinet pictures, usually of a small size, Boucher often employed the pastoral for large-scale room decorations such as in this case.
The two pictures originally belonged to the Daniel-Charles Trudaine, who worked as governor of the Auvergne, then was put in charge of roads and bridges in France and extended and modernised the network considerably. From 1745 he instigated and supervised the production of a new street atlas of France. Trudaine hung the two paintings in the grand salon on the ground floor of his château at Montigny–Lencoup near Fontainebleau.
The scene was inspired by the theatrical characters of the immensely popular pantomimes of Boucher's friend, Charles-Simon Favart. At the Opéra Comique, where Boucher was both set designer and a keen member of the audience, Favart’s musical dramas combined the Arcadian idealism and aristocratic sensibilities of pastoral poetry with the rustic, sentimental characters of popular theatre. Here we see a recreation of scene VI of Favart’s pantomime 'Les Vendanges de Tempé (The Harvest in the Vale of Tempé)', first produced in 1745, where the amorous Little Shepherd feeds grapes to the heroine, Lisette. The watching shepherd to the right is taken from a Rembrandt etching.
Boucher also provided a drawing of the main group to the Sèvres manufacture as a model for a porcelain group.

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Francois Boucher

Work Overview