Are They Thinking About the Grape

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Are They Thinking About the Grape: Francois Boucher

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Francois Boucher Oil Painting - Are They Thinking About the Grape

Keywords: Thinking, Grape

Work Overview: Are They Thinking about the Grape?
Pensent-ils au raisin?
Francois Boucher
Date: 1747
Style: Rococo
Genre: pastorale
Oil on canvas
oval, 80.8 x 68.5 cm (31 3/4 x 27 in.)

Although he painted a broad range of subjects and executed designs for porcelain and tapestries, François Boucher's canvases of pastoral themes represent his most influential contribution to 18th-century French art. These idealized visions of rustic life, indebted to Jean-Antoine Watteau's images of fête galantes, or open-air courtship parties, typically feature shepherds and shepherdesses engaged in amorous pursuits. This work was inspired by a contemporary theater piece, which was first performed as a pantomime at a Parisian fair in 1745. The painting's playfully coy title derives from that of an engraving of a similar image.

Inspired in part by Jean-Antoine Watteau’s fête galante paintings, François Boucher revived the pastoral theme in French painting, specializing in images of shepherds and shepherdesses as rustic lovers. Boucher was a master of many types of painting—portraits, landscapes, genre scenes, and especially mythological subjects, often with erotic content. He rose from a humble background to achieve great success in the Parisian art world as First Painter to King Louis XV in 1765.
Are They Thinking about the Grape?—a bucolic scene inspired by an 18th-century Parisian play—illustrates a moment in which a love-struck shepherd and shepherdess exchange grapes picked in an unseen vineyard. Sexual innuendoes, driven home by the title, underpin the apparent innocence of the couple’s encounter. The contrast between the couple’s rustic origins and their luxurious versions of country dress demonstrates Boucher’s ability to create a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Rustic themes correspond to a current in 18th-century French thought that advocated a return to nature, a concept consistent with the regard for natural law and natural rights espoused by Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers. The fashion for emulating peasant life even permeated the royal court, where Marie Antoinette donned country garb and strolled through the grounds of Versailles.
A royal Swedish architect commissioned a second version of Are They Thinking about the Grape? in 1747. Beyond differences in shape (the Swedish version is rectangular, compared to the oval Chicago canvas), there are variations in content. In the Art Institute’s painting, a young boy and small cluster of sheep rest on the left. In the Swedish version, Boucher replaced the boy and sheep with a view of a river and hamlet. Both paintings, with their pastel palettes, painterly brushwork, and themes, are exceptionally fine examples of the popular pastoral genre in the Rococo mode that Boucher perfected.

Between 1775 and 1792 Goya created over 60 tapestry cartoons for the Spanish royal residences. Boy on a Ram is related to a series of tapestries that illustrates the four seasons. The painting symbolizes spring: an aristocratic boy costumed in a matador’s suit is happily riding a ram that represents Aries, one of the astrological signs of the season. Raising a stick in his right hand and swinging his legs, the boy urges the ram forward, while the animal stands stubbornly with his feet planted. Goya’s early works, such as this one, are Rococo in style. The colors and the mood of the painting are light. In his mature works, Goya’s palette became much darker and his subjects more serious (see Friar Pedro de Zaldivia Shoots the Bandit Maragato).

As a variety of his popular pastoral scenes, Boucher increasingly began to inject erotic overtones into these simple representations. Here two young peasants -- she a shepherdess, he a goat-herd -- feed each other grapes in the midst of a lavish landscape. The anachronisms of this genre remain: both are barefoot, yet she wears a lavishly ornate dress.

New is the title which Boucher gives to this work: Are they only thinking of grapes? The implication is clear: love and lust are not reserved for gods and goddesses, or even aristocrats, but dominates even the simple life.

By this painting the beholder is carried away into an idyllic world of bliss. Boucher is a master of salacious scenes and plays artfully with a number of sensuous charms: the flesh tones of the pale skin, the soft and smooth fabrics, the colours and also the lighting of the painting.

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Francois Boucher

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