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Lot Essay
Known to his contemporaries as ‘the painter of the Graces’ for his many celebrated depictions of seductive female nudes and mythological deities, François Boucher was the dominate force in the visual arts in France in the middle of the 18th century. 'No longer a painter, but Painting itself' it was written of him in the 1750s, and, indeed, not since Charles Le Brun had a single artist exercised a comparable monopoly over the imagery of a particular society.
The son of a master painter in the Académie de Saint-Luc in Paris, Boucher received his initial training in his father’s shop, before spending a brief apprenticeship with the history painter, François Lemoyne, whose pearly, painterly manner is apparent in much of Boucher’s early work. Having won the Prix de Rome in 1723, Boucher set on the course of study offered by the Academy to promising history painters. However, owing to administrative mismanagement, there was no room for him at the French Academy in Rome and he was obliged to delay his visit. Boucher’s artistic education continued in Paris and on the margins of academic pedagogy: among other jobs, he contributed more than one hundred etchings of Watteau’s paintings and drawings to the compendium of prints published after the master’s works. Not only did the exposure to Watteau’s art leave an indelible mark of Boucher’s emerging style, but the generous fee he received enabled the young artist to travel to Rome in 1728 at his own expense.
Back in France by the summer of 1731, Boucher rapidly ascended the Academy’s hierarchy – associate member in 1731; full member in 1734, assistant professor by 1735; full professor in 1737. He began to receive important decorative commissions from aristocratic and royal patrons, as well as rich collectors on the margins of the court, the most important of which – seven overdoors for the hôtel de Soubise – confirmed his authority as the most fluent and inventive of the new generation of history painters.
It was likely his overdoor decorations for the hôtel de Soubise in 1738 – including the luminous and pearlescent Venus and Cupid at the Bath (in situ; Paris, Archives Nationales), that led to the commission of the present painting of the Sleeping Diana. Recorded in the collections of Pierre-Gaspard-Marie Grimod (1748-1809), comte d’Orsay, in his hôtel particulier on the rue de Varenne, it is almost certain that the Sleeping Diana was actually commissioned in the late 1730s by Grimod’s father, Pierre Grimod du Fort (1692-1748). A fermier général, secrétaire du Roi, and superintendent of the Post Office, Grimod du Fort was one of the richest men in France. In 1741, he acquired the fiefdom of Orsay in the valley of Chevreuse, built a château and designed extensive gardens around it, which were completed after his death and enhanced by his son. Seven years earlier, in 1734, he purchased the hôtel Chamillard (formerly the hôtel de Gesvres), a grand townhouse on the rue du Coq-Héron, which he extensively renovated. The centerpiece of its redecoration were ten large tapestries depicting the ‘Story of Don Quixote’ to be designed by Boucher’s acclaimed rival, Charles Natoire. The artist’s cartoons were commissioned in 1734, but the huge project was not completed until 1744. The tapestries (today in the Musée des Tapisseries in Aix-en-Provence) were woven at the Beauvais factory and installed, as they were completed, in the hôtel Chamillard; the painted cartoons were dispatched to the château in Orsay (today in the Musée national du Château de Compiègne).
Pierre Grimod du Fort died in 1748, shortly before his wife, Marie-Antoinette-Felicité de Caulaincourt (b. 1731), gave birth to their only child, Pierre-Gaspard-Marie Grimod d’Orsay. In 1768, two years after reaching the age of majority and assuming control of his vast inheritance, Pierre-Gaspard purchased the hôtel de Saissac (now the hôtel de Clermont) at 69, rue de Varenne, built in 1708, and immediately launched its extensive renovation. In 1770, Pierre-Gaspard was raised to the title of comte d’Orsay by Louis XV and, on the last day of that year, married Princess Marie-Louise Amélie de Cröy-Molembais (1748-1772), who died giving birth to their only child less than two years later.
With the ongoing decoration of the Paris townhouse – rechristened the hôtel d’Orsay – Pierre-Gaspard commissioned and acquired numerous paintings, sculptures, porcelains and ceiling decorations as part of its ornamentation, and also relocated to it art works acquired by his father for the hôtel Chamillard and château d’Orsay, as inventories from the 1770s indicate. Numerous overdoor panels from his father’s residence were repurposed in the newly refurbished hôtel d’Orsay, including paintings by Natoire, Jean-François de Troy and Boucher. Among these were Boucher’s Sleeping Diana, inventoried as ‘Diane endormie au retour de la chasse’, which had been installed over a doorway in his father’s salon de compagnie, where it served as a pendant to Boucher’s ‘Une femme qui verse de l’eau d’un vase’ (‘A Woman pouring Water from a Vase’; lost). Pierre-Gaspard commissioned from Hughes Taraval (1729-1785) a more thematically appropriate pendant for Boucher’s painting of the mythical Diana, ordering from Taraval a depiction of ‘Adonis quittant Venus pour aller à la chasse’ (‘Adonis departing Venus for the Hunt’; location unknown). The paintings were placed in carved wood surrounds above doors in the historic ‘salon de la marquise de Pompignan.’
Boucher’s Sleeping Diana depicts the Goddess of the Hunt – readily identified by the traditional attributes of a crescent moon adorning her headdress and a quiver of arrows beneath her arm – slumbering after a hunt, the trophies of the day laying at her feet. Bathed in the soft glow of early twilight and shielded from the sight of others by a rich, scarlet drape of heavy velvet, she reveals her nude body in the unselfconsciousness of sleep. Embellished with strings of pearls at her wrist and in her hair, she rests her cheek on her hand, eyes closed in a dream, as Boucher renders her limpid flesh with an idealizing attention of which he was a master. Here, as in so many supple nudes that would follow, the artist illustrates his dictum that ‘women should have bodies but no bones.’ Although Boucher’s early biographers, and the artist himself, claimed that his early years in Italy made little impression on him or his art, the Sleeping Diana suggests otherwise, for it is almost unimaginable without the precedent of Titian’s sensual nudes. Despite Titian’s Danaë lying awake with eyes cast anxiously upward at the arrival of Zeus in the guise of a shower of gold (fig. 1), her reclining pose and placement on the canvas are almost directly mirrored by Boucher in the present painting, as is the luminous rendering of her ample flesh and sensuous play of light and shadow across it. In characteristic fashion, Boucher transformed Titian’s vision of tragic destiny into one of pastoral tranquility and easy, erotic delight. Multiple versions of the Danaë exist, from Titian’s hand or workshop assistants, and if Boucher did not know the composition during his time in Italy, he would certainly have had access to Crozat’s collection in Paris, which held a celebrated version until 1772, when it was acquired by Catherine the Great and departed for Russia (Hermitage, St. Petersburg).
The broad, barely concealed brushwork, and subtly striated flesh of the Sleeping Diana – somewhat analogous in handling to that of certain contemporary Venetian painters, such as Sebastiano Ricci – permits us to date the painting on stylistic grounds to the later 1730s, the same moment when Boucher executed his canvases for the hôtel de Soubise and only a few years after his earliest, mythological masterpieces, painted for the billiard room of François Derbais. This date provides further support for the Diana having been commissioned by the elder Grimod: as noted by Alastair Laing (in correspondence with the owner, 3 April 2011), two other surviving overdoors by Boucher that were commissioned by Grimod du Fort are signed and dated ‘1738’, and it seems likely that the present picture was painted at the same moment. It is not known when the canvas was altered with discreet additions to render it a standard rectangular shape, but it was probably done in the 19th century when overdoors were regularly transformed into easel paintings for modern display; the original scalloped edges, designed to fit into the arabesque design of the boiserie molding in which it was inserted, can still be detected in raking light.
The son of a master painter in the Académie de Saint-Luc in Paris, Boucher received his initial training in his father’s shop, before spending a brief apprenticeship with the history painter, François Lemoyne, whose pearly, painterly manner is apparent in much of Boucher’s early work. Having won the Prix de Rome in 1723, Boucher set on the course of study offered by the Academy to promising history painters. However, owing to administrative mismanagement, there was no room for him at the French Academy in Rome and he was obliged to delay his visit. Boucher’s artistic education continued in Paris and on the margins of academic pedagogy: among other jobs, he contributed more than one hundred etchings of Watteau’s paintings and drawings to the compendium of prints published after the master’s works. Not only did the exposure to Watteau’s art leave an indelible mark of Boucher’s emerging style, but the generous fee he received enabled the young artist to travel to Rome in 1728 at his own expense.
Back in France by the summer of 1731, Boucher rapidly ascended the Academy’s hierarchy – associate member in 1731; full member in 1734, assistant professor by 1735; full professor in 1737. He began to receive important decorative commissions from aristocratic and royal patrons, as well as rich collectors on the margins of the court, the most important of which – seven overdoors for the hôtel de Soubise – confirmed his authority as the most fluent and inventive of the new generation of history painters.
It was likely his overdoor decorations for the hôtel de Soubise in 1738 – including the luminous and pearlescent Venus and Cupid at the Bath (in situ; Paris, Archives Nationales), that led to the commission of the present painting of the Sleeping Diana. Recorded in the collections of Pierre-Gaspard-Marie Grimod (1748-1809), comte d’Orsay, in his hôtel particulier on the rue de Varenne, it is almost certain that the Sleeping Diana was actually commissioned in the late 1730s by Grimod’s father, Pierre Grimod du Fort (1692-1748). A fermier général, secrétaire du Roi, and superintendent of the Post Office, Grimod du Fort was one of the richest men in France. In 1741, he acquired the fiefdom of Orsay in the valley of Chevreuse, built a château and designed extensive gardens around it, which were completed after his death and enhanced by his son. Seven years earlier, in 1734, he purchased the hôtel Chamillard (formerly the hôtel de Gesvres), a grand townhouse on the rue du Coq-Héron, which he extensively renovated. The centerpiece of its redecoration were ten large tapestries depicting the ‘Story of Don Quixote’ to be designed by Boucher’s acclaimed rival, Charles Natoire. The artist’s cartoons were commissioned in 1734, but the huge project was not completed until 1744. The tapestries (today in the Musée des Tapisseries in Aix-en-Provence) were woven at the Beauvais factory and installed, as they were completed, in the hôtel Chamillard; the painted cartoons were dispatched to the château in Orsay (today in the Musée national du Château de Compiègne).
Pierre Grimod du Fort died in 1748, shortly before his wife, Marie-Antoinette-Felicité de Caulaincourt (b. 1731), gave birth to their only child, Pierre-Gaspard-Marie Grimod d’Orsay. In 1768, two years after reaching the age of majority and assuming control of his vast inheritance, Pierre-Gaspard purchased the hôtel de Saissac (now the hôtel de Clermont) at 69, rue de Varenne, built in 1708, and immediately launched its extensive renovation. In 1770, Pierre-Gaspard was raised to the title of comte d’Orsay by Louis XV and, on the last day of that year, married Princess Marie-Louise Amélie de Cröy-Molembais (1748-1772), who died giving birth to their only child less than two years later.
With the ongoing decoration of the Paris townhouse – rechristened the hôtel d’Orsay – Pierre-Gaspard commissioned and acquired numerous paintings, sculptures, porcelains and ceiling decorations as part of its ornamentation, and also relocated to it art works acquired by his father for the hôtel Chamillard and château d’Orsay, as inventories from the 1770s indicate. Numerous overdoor panels from his father’s residence were repurposed in the newly refurbished hôtel d’Orsay, including paintings by Natoire, Jean-François de Troy and Boucher. Among these were Boucher’s Sleeping Diana, inventoried as ‘Diane endormie au retour de la chasse’, which had been installed over a doorway in his father’s salon de compagnie, where it served as a pendant to Boucher’s ‘Une femme qui verse de l’eau d’un vase’ (‘A Woman pouring Water from a Vase’; lost). Pierre-Gaspard commissioned from Hughes Taraval (1729-1785) a more thematically appropriate pendant for Boucher’s painting of the mythical Diana, ordering from Taraval a depiction of ‘Adonis quittant Venus pour aller à la chasse’ (‘Adonis departing Venus for the Hunt’; location unknown). The paintings were placed in carved wood surrounds above doors in the historic ‘salon de la marquise de Pompignan.’
Boucher’s Sleeping Diana depicts the Goddess of the Hunt – readily identified by the traditional attributes of a crescent moon adorning her headdress and a quiver of arrows beneath her arm – slumbering after a hunt, the trophies of the day laying at her feet. Bathed in the soft glow of early twilight and shielded from the sight of others by a rich, scarlet drape of heavy velvet, she reveals her nude body in the unselfconsciousness of sleep. Embellished with strings of pearls at her wrist and in her hair, she rests her cheek on her hand, eyes closed in a dream, as Boucher renders her limpid flesh with an idealizing attention of which he was a master. Here, as in so many supple nudes that would follow, the artist illustrates his dictum that ‘women should have bodies but no bones.’ Although Boucher’s early biographers, and the artist himself, claimed that his early years in Italy made little impression on him or his art, the Sleeping Diana suggests otherwise, for it is almost unimaginable without the precedent of Titian’s sensual nudes. Despite Titian’s Danaë lying awake with eyes cast anxiously upward at the arrival of Zeus in the guise of a shower of gold (fig. 1), her reclining pose and placement on the canvas are almost directly mirrored by Boucher in the present painting, as is the luminous rendering of her ample flesh and sensuous play of light and shadow across it. In characteristic fashion, Boucher transformed Titian’s vision of tragic destiny into one of pastoral tranquility and easy, erotic delight. Multiple versions of the Danaë exist, from Titian’s hand or workshop assistants, and if Boucher did not know the composition during his time in Italy, he would certainly have had access to Crozat’s collection in Paris, which held a celebrated version until 1772, when it was acquired by Catherine the Great and departed for Russia (Hermitage, St. Petersburg).
The broad, barely concealed brushwork, and subtly striated flesh of the Sleeping Diana – somewhat analogous in handling to that of certain contemporary Venetian painters, such as Sebastiano Ricci – permits us to date the painting on stylistic grounds to the later 1730s, the same moment when Boucher executed his canvases for the hôtel de Soubise and only a few years after his earliest, mythological masterpieces, painted for the billiard room of François Derbais. This date provides further support for the Diana having been commissioned by the elder Grimod: as noted by Alastair Laing (in correspondence with the owner, 3 April 2011), two other surviving overdoors by Boucher that were commissioned by Grimod du Fort are signed and dated ‘1738’, and it seems likely that the present picture was painted at the same moment. It is not known when the canvas was altered with discreet additions to render it a standard rectangular shape, but it was probably done in the 19th century when overdoors were regularly transformed into easel paintings for modern display; the original scalloped edges, designed to fit into the arabesque design of the boiserie molding in which it was inserted, can still be detected in raking light.