François Boucher

Madame Josette Day-Solvey, her sale, Paris, Tajan, 24 March 2003, lot 33

Hinged to mount at upper margin. Overall in very good condition. Medium remains strong and vibrant and sheet clean. The paper has slightly buckled at the lower margin., perhaps from where it was previously laid down. There is a repaired tear at the upper left margin, visible on the verso. There are a few tiny stains of what appears to look like white gouache, barely visible - one located at the centre of the right margin and one at the lower margin towards to the right corner. Sold in a gilded frame.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The subject of Rinaldo and Armida, taken from Torquato Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata, was very popular in 17th and 18th-century France, both in painting and in the theatre: Lully's 1686 opera was widely perfomed and revived, and Boucher himself worked, together with his son, on the sets of the 1761 production, and possibly also on those of 1746 and 1747, at which time he was officially working for the Opéra.¹  Boucher also chose this theme for his morceau de réception,  the grand canvas, now in the Louvre, which he submitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture following his election in January 1734.² 

The present drawing, a wonderfully energetic and extremely well preserved example of Boucher's fully formed mature style, must date from much later in the artist's career.  Alastair Laing has kindly proposed that it (and also a variant drawing in reverse, in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin³) may be a design for the last in a set of eight Beauvais tapestries of the Aventures de Renaud et Armide that Oudry and Boucher proposed in October 1751.  Such a dating is also plausible on stylistic grounds. The tapestry project was never realized, and its only tangible product was Boucher's cartoon for Renaud endormi, a tapestry produced in the following year as part of the set of Fragments d’Opéra.⁴ 

1.  François Boucher 1703-1770, exhib. cat., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, and Paris, Grand Palais, 1986-87, p. 166
2.  Inv. 2720;  François Boucher, exhib. cat., op. cit., 1986-87, cat. 26
3.  Inv. 1827, as J.-B. Huet.  Formerly also attributed to Parizeau, but in Alastair Laing's opinion by Boucher. 
4.  E. Standen, ‘The Fragments d’Opéra: A Series of Beauvais Tapestries after Boucher’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, no.21, 1986, pp.123-24