NARRATOR:
The painter and printmaker François Boucher was one of the most prolific artists of 18th-century France. His pastoral and mythological scenes epitomize the frivolity and sensuousness of the rococo style.
In this early work of 1732, Boucher depicts a beautiful country woman tending three charming, if slightly ragged, children. Alluring in her low-cut bodice, she is surrounded by food and utensils.
Boucher's light-hearted image focuses on the quiet domesticity and human interest of the scene. He suggests with little moralizing, that simple happiness is easily attained in modest surroundings. The picturesque arrangement of the interior, dark palette, and painterly brushwork recall the charm and intimacy of 17th-century Dutch genre painting.
Boucher left his mark on both the fine and decorative arts. He created not only hundreds of paintings, but engravings, tapestry designs, ornamental boudoir panels, and book illustrations too. His sentimental, playful style was widely imitated, but fell out of favor with the rise of enlightenment ideas in the 18th century.
Beautiful Country Woman
c. 1732
François Boucher (French, 1703-1770)
On View
In the decades before he was appointed first painter to King Louis XV in 1765, François Boucher painted many cabinet-sized pictures of a wide variety of subjects for private collectors. Although best known for his sensuous mythological and pastoral paintings, during this early period Boucher also experimented with subjects from everyday life, including peasant “low-life” scenes inspired by seventeenth-century Northern European art. The Beautiful Country Woman (La Belle Villageoise) lacks the coarse or satirical features often associated with Dutch paintings of this subject, however. Instead, Boucher treats with great sympathy the young country woman surrounded by her three robust yet scruffy children in a humble domestic interior. In front of the family, on the kitchen floor, Boucher has rendered a Dutch-inspired still life of copper pots and plump root vegetables to underscore the association between peasant life, simplicity and closeness to nature.
Details
- Artist Name: François Boucher (French, 1703-1770)
- Title: Beautiful Country Woman
- Date: c. 1732
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 16-1/8 x 12 in. (41.0 x 30.5 cm)
- Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation, Gift of Jennifer Jones Simon
- Accession Number: M.1999.1.P
- Copyright: © Norton Simon Art Foundation
Object Information
[?]Duc de Luynes, 1748-1793 (sale, Paris, Maison Bullion, 21 November 1793, lot 46).
W... collection, Paris (sale, Paris, 17 February 1802, lot 44).
Vicomte Aguado, Marquis de la Marismas (sale, Paris, 18-22 April 1843, lot 3).
Cousin (sale, Paris, 20 December 1847, no. 41).
Ridgway, by 1883/1884, by descent to;
Marquise de Ganay, née Ridgway, in 1909 - (sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 8-10 March 1922, lot 30, to);
Stettiner, buying for;
Odgen Mills (d. 1929), by descent to his daughter;
Lady Beatrice Granard, née Mills (1874-1948, wife of Bernard Arthur Forbes, 8th Earl of Granard), London.
[Wildenstein].
Charles E. Dunlap (1888-1966), New York (sale, New York, Parke-Bernet, 13 April 1963, lot 114, ill., as La Belle Villageoise, to);
[Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York; sold 1979 to];
Norton Simon, acc. N.1979.01.1.P., by bequest 1993 to;
Jennifer Jones Simon, gift 1999 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
W... collection, Paris (sale, Paris, 17 February 1802, lot 44).
Vicomte Aguado, Marquis de la Marismas (sale, Paris, 18-22 April 1843, lot 3).
Cousin (sale, Paris, 20 December 1847, no. 41).
Ridgway, by 1883/1884, by descent to;
Marquise de Ganay, née Ridgway, in 1909 - (sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 8-10 March 1922, lot 30, to);
Stettiner, buying for;
Odgen Mills (d. 1929), by descent to his daughter;
Lady Beatrice Granard, née Mills (1874-1948, wife of Bernard Arthur Forbes, 8th Earl of Granard), London.
[Wildenstein].
Charles E. Dunlap (1888-1966), New York (sale, New York, Parke-Bernet, 13 April 1963, lot 114, ill., as La Belle Villageoise, to);
[Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York; sold 1979 to];
Norton Simon, acc. N.1979.01.1.P., by bequest 1993 to;
Jennifer Jones Simon, gift 1999 to;
Norton Simon Art Foundation.
L'art XIIIeme siècle
- Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 1883 to 1884
[on loan]
- Notre Dame, Art Gallery, University of Notre Dame, 1979-01-12 to
All Consuming: Art and the Essence of Food
- Norton Simon Museum, 2023-04-14 to 2023-08-14
- Michel, André, François Boucher, p. 30
- Kahn, G., François Boucher, p. 25
- Michel, André, François Boucher, no. 1136 pp. 63, 152, 169, 170
- Dreyfus, C., Les Arts, pp. 6-7, 11
- Gazette de Beaux-Arts, no. 49 p. 52
- Ananoff, Alexandre, François Boucher, item 100, no. 78, fig. 341 pp. 15, 210-212, opp. page 208
- Posner, Donald, Art Bulletin, fig. 17 p. 100
- La Renaissance, p. 349
- Goncourt, Edmond; and Jules Goncourt, L'art du XIIIme siècle, 1880, (1881 ed. p. 201) p. 190
- Galerie Georges Petit, L'art XIIIeme siècle, 1883, no. 11
- Nolhac, P. de, François Boucher, premier peintre du roi, 1907, pp. 20, 28, 131
- Nevill, R., French Prints of the 18th century, 1908, pp. 118-119
- Comstock, Helen, Antiques, 1952, p. 248
- Ananoff, Alexandre, L'oeuvre deissiné de François Boucher (1703-1770), 1966, no. 13
- Bailey, C., The First Painters of the King: French Royal Taste from Louis XIV to the Revolution, 1985, no. 75 p. 133
- Rosenberg, Pierre & M. Hilaire, Boucher-60 chefs d'oeuvre, 1986, no. 15
- Rosenberg, Pierre, The Painted Cat: the cat in Western painting from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, 1988, pp. 136-137
- Campbell, Sara, Collector Without Walls: Norton Simon and His Hunt for the Best, 2010, cat. 1565 p. 421
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