Collection Online as of May 28, 2022
Head of a Young Woman
François Boucher
(French, 1703-1770)
Oil on canvas
Bequest of Muriel Butkin 2012.95
Location
not on view
Description
This work was catalogued as "style of Chardin" when it entered the museum's collection, and was considered a minor rococo revival work of the 1800s. In 2011, the museum asked Alastair Laing, the leading scholar of the artist Boucher, to study it. He confirmed that the painting is a rare survival from the artist's early career—one of only two known oil studies of this type by the artist.
François Boucher
French Rococo artist who epitomizes the frivolous and elegant court life of France in the mid-18th century. During his early career he was closely associated with Watteau, many of whose paintings he engraved. Boucher was a successful and incredibly prolific artistic who had a major impact on both fine and decorative art of the 18th century. He is particularly noted for having reinvented the genre of the pastoral, creating images of shepherds and shepherdesses as sentimental lovers that was taken up in a variety of medium. Boucher's sketchy manner of painting helped to promote painterliness as an end in itself. This trend dominated French painting until the emergence of Neoclassicism, when the tides of criticism turned against Boucher and his followers.