François Boucher Paris 1703 - 1770

Possibly M. Langlois, Paris, 1750;
Pierre-Jacques-Onesyme Bergeret (1715-1785);
His deceased sale, Paris, Folliot et al., 24 April 1786, lot 63;
The Marquise d'H...;
His sale, Paris, Charpentier, 9 June 1933, lots 16 and 17, for 122,500 Francs to Beaurain;
M. Beaurain, Paris;
His sale, Paris, Ader Picard Tajan, 14 April 1988, lot 5, for 5,200,000 Francs;
An institution, by whom sold anonymously, London, Sotheby's, 3 July 1996, lot 56, when bought by the present owner.

Possibly Paris, Salon, 1750, no. 25: "Deux paysages d'environ 2 pieds & demi, orne de Figures sur le devant, appartenans a M. Langlois".

P. de Nolhac, François Boucher, Paris 1907, pp. 165-6;
G. Wildenstein, "Un amateur de Boucher et de Fragonard, Jacques-Onesyme Bergeret (1715-1785)," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. LVII, July-August 1961, p. 66, no. 27;
A. Ananoff, François Boucher, Paris-Lausanne 1976, vol. I, pp. 373-4, nos. 257 and 258, reproduced figs. 773 and 777;
A. Ananoff and D. Wildenstein, L'opera completa di Boucher, Milan 1980, p. 106, nos. 264 and 265;
A. Laing, in A. Laing et al., François Boucher, exhibition catalogue, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17 February - 4 May 1986, p. 27 (as lost);
G. Brunel, Boucher, London 1986, pp. 180-1 (as lost).

ENGRAVED (the former only):
Gilles Demarteau, Le Garçonnet sue le pont, in the same sense, soft-ground (chalk manner) etching, no. 292;
Ingram, le Savoyard avec la marmotte;
Gilles Demarteau, Le jeune savoyard, soft-ground (chalk-manner) etching, no. 76;
Thiers, Le jeune savoyard.

The relatively recent discovery of the date 1750 on Le Moulin à Eau (around the time of the 1988 sale, see Provenance below) has helped to establish the present paintings as the earliest pair of landscapes by Boucher to have remained together.  The date was clearly unknown to Ananoff (see Literature below) who, though he correctly catalogued Le Pigeonnier as signed, listed neither a signature nor date on Le Moulin.  In addition, Ananoff had identified the present pair of landscapes as those exhibited by Boucher in the Salon of 1743.  Alastair Laing has since proposed that this pair may therefore be the landscapes exhibited at the Salon of 1750 belonging to a "M. Langlois".  While further detail concerning Langlois remains a mystery, a great deal is known about the first certainly recorded owner of the present paintings, Pierre-Jacques-Onesyme Bergeret (1715-85).  The self-styled Bergeret de Grancout, Receveur General des Finances  to Louis XV was one of the wealthiest men in Europe.  He formed a vast art collection, concentrating in large part on contemporary Fench art, and in particular on works by Boucher.  At the time of his death he owned around 760 paintings, drawings and engravings by Boucher including Le Joueur de Flageolot which was until recently in the collection of the present owner (sold, New York, Sotheby's, 23 January 2003, lot 90).  The present pair was listed as no. 27 in the inventory of paintings in Bergeret's hotel particulier on the rue du Temple in Paris, drawn up at the time of his death in 1785.

Landscape painting in its purest form had been largely neglected in favour of history painting in France in the first three decades of the 18th century.  Certainly there were no practitioners during that time comparable to Claude or Poussin in the previous century.  Boucher, along with his friend and fellow artist, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, did more than anyone to revitalize the genre of landscape painting from the 1740s onwards.  Indeed, he was alone among the officiers of the Académie to regularly exhibit landscapes.  Boucher's interest in the French countryside may have been engendered by his association with Oudry at the Beauvais tapestry manufactory where Boucher first worked as a designer in the mid-1730s.  There he probably joined Oudry's organised sketching parties in the countryside of Arcueil and the environs of Beauvais.  In the present pair, Boucher has transformed his observations of the fertile landscape around Beauvais into an impossibly idyllic conception of rural life.  Boucher's landscapes were always more concerned with artifice than nature and they capture it to perfection, as Theophile Gautier famously observed over a century later in 1867; "that idyllic world invented by Boucher for the use of the eighteenth century...The sheep are shampooed, the shepherdesses are tight-laced with rows of ribbons, and their complexions quite without that weather-beaten country look, while the shepherds look like ballet dancers.  But it is all irresistably seductive, and the lie is much more agreeable than the truth".