Description:

red chalk
190 x 275 mm

Provenance:

Octave Linet (1870-1962), Paris
His sale, Me Libert au Palais Galliéra, Paris: 23 March 1963, lot 15, illustrated [as: “attributed François Boucher”]
Private collection, France

Note:

This carefully constructed composition, divided centrally by a path between a farmhouse and a foliage repoussoir, is a typical example of the French landscape drawings produced in the middle of the 18th century by the artists in the circle of François Boucher. To the right a draughtsman and his companion pause to capture this idyll of rural life. Unlike his contemporaries Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Hubert Robert, whose landscape drawings were marked by their experiences in Italy, Boucher’s landscape drawings are rooted in a more Northern tradition, drawing inspiration from both the French countryside and the 17th century Dutch landscape tradition, in particular the farm and peasant scenes of Abraham Bloemaert. Drawn in the popular medium of red chalk, sheets such as this were intended as autonomous works of art for sale to the bourgeoning market of aristocratic and bourgeois collectors.