Old Master Drawings

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Lot 141
  • 141

François Boucher

Estimate
6,000 - 8,000 GBP
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Description

  • François Boucher
  • a decorative design with minerva and history attended by a putto
  • Black heightened with white chalk, on beige paper

Provenance

With Galerie Cailleux, Paris (bears its mark, not in Lugt);
their exhibition, François Boucher, Premier peintre du Roi, 1703-1770, May-June 1964, no. 81;
with Spencer Samuels, New York, Inaugural Exhibition, 1984, no. 33;
sale, London, Christie's, 2 July 1996, lot 243

Literature

P. Jean-Richard, L'oeuvre gravé de François Boucher dans la collection Edmond de Rothschild, Paris 1978, p. 211, under cat. no. 791

Catalogue Note

In her catalogue of the engravings of Boucher, Pierette Jean-Richard noted the similarity of this design to a print of a ceiling design with a nymph and putti by Giles Demarteau, after a lost drawing by Boucher, suggesting that they were made in preparation for the same decorative project.1  Boucher was involved with several elaborate ornamental schemes, producing designs for ceilings, spandrels, overdoors and wall compartments in the royal apartments at Versailles, the Salle du Conseil at Fontainebleau, the Hôtel de Soubise and the châteaux of Madame de Pompadour. 

The purpose of this drawing is unknown, but it appears to be preparatory for the stucco overdoor of an elaborate interior, with the hints of an oval shape in the upper part of the sheet seemingly indicating the frame of a painting above.  A comparable design for an overdoor in black chalk is in the E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, Sacramento,2 and another in the same media was sold in London, Sotheby's, 5 December 1977, lot 113.

We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the attribution to Boucher, and dating the drawing to the 1760s. 

1.  P. Jean-Richard, see Literature

2.  R.S. Slatkin, François Boucher in North American Collections: 100 Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1974, p. 21, cat. no. 15