Hercules and Omphale

This is early Boucher, painted in Paris around 1732, when he was back from Rome and making his name in a city hungry for light, sensual mythology. The story comes from the Greek hero Hercules, sentenced for a killing to serve Queen Omphale of Lydia by doing women's work in women's clothes. Painters usually showed him sheepish at the spinning wheel. Boucher throws that out and paints the two locked in a frank kiss, tangled together on a heap of cushions, while Omphale reaches for his great club and a pair of plump cupids tug at his lion skin below. The hero looks anything but heroic. It is the kind of picture that would soon make Boucher the favourite painter of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis the Fifteenth.