François Boucher

François Boucher often produced finished drawings of children and putti as autonomous works of art, which proved very popular with collectors. Often these groups of infants or winged putti were taken from his paintings and worked up into independent compositions, and several of these drawings were engraved by different printmakers and included in five Livres des groupes d’enfans, published by Huquier. The Goncourt brothers wrote of these winged putti that ‘They appear everywhere in [Boucher’s] work…They are always a charming spectacle, with their fat little hands, their rotund stomachs and navels like dimples, their cupid’s bottoms, their chubby calves.’ As the Boucher scholar Alastair Laing has further noted, ‘There were two kinds of subject matter that Boucher made utterly his own, engraved images of which reached the remotest corners of Europe, and formed a repertoire upon which other artists and craftsmen could draw: the pastoral and putti…The French call cupids amours, or “loves”, which makes their underlying message much plainer. Boucher was particularly good at showing cupids disporting in the air, since that gave his imagination the freest rein.’

Relatively few drawings by Boucher related to his ornamental designs have survived. As Françoise Joulie points out, ‘Boucher’s contributions to the decorative arts are well known, but drawings related to his work in this genre are rare. Those few extant drawings reveal his designs for andirons, chandeliers, clocks, musical instruments, screens and silverware, as well as schemes for porcelain for the manufactories of Sèvres and Vincennes. The earlier drawings are strongly marked by the Rococo mode – a style he helped to create – and the later works, especially those after 1760, are imbued with an elegant, discreet Neoclassicism.’

This sizeable sheet aptly highlights Boucher’s abilities as a designer of cartouches and frames, and can be closely related to two equally large and stylistically comparable drawings of putti surrounding an ornamental shield surmounted by a ducal crown. Of a similar technique and scale to the present sheet but oval in format is a drawing formerly in the Houthakker collection and today in the Horvitz collection in Boston, while another related drawing of a cartouche with a coat of arms supported by putti is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The late Alastair Laing was the first to suggest that the initials AN visible on the shield in the present sheet indicate that it may have been intended for a commission from Adrien Maurice de Noailles, 3rd Duc de Noailles and Maréchal de France (1678-1766). He also noted that the shield in the Horvitz drawing incorporates the order of the Golden Fleece, and that the Duc de Noailles was one of the very few nobles in France who had earned that particular decoration, which he was awarded in 1702. The scale of the present sheet, and of the two related drawings in the Horvitz and Fitzwilliam Musuem collections, would suggest that all three may have been studies for the decoration of the door panel of the duke’s coach. (Indeed, the fact that Fitzwilliam drawing is pricked for transfer would also support such a connection.) As Laing further points out, ‘It is hardly likely that Boucher would have undertaken the actual task of painting coach panels himself, or even that his studio would have done so…They will instead have been executed by one of the specialist carriage-painters, capable of providing the brilliantly varnished finish that such works required...Thanks to these three drawings, we can see that Boucher was indeed capable of effortlessly turning to making designs for such bagatelles when occasion arose.’  

The present drawing once belonged to the art historian Michael Jaffé (1923-1997), who served as director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge between 1973 and 1990.