Landscape with a Watermill

Watermills were a favourite subject for painters in 18th-century France, and most of them learned it from Dutch pictures of the 17th century, with their creaking wheels, sluices and patched-up sheds. Boucher painted this one in 1755 and staged it his own way. Tall trees close off both sides like the wings of a theatre, a device borrowed from Claude, the great landscape painter of the previous age. Inside that frame sits a weathered mill with a thatched roof, smoke rising from the chimney and white doves on its wooden balcony. Country people go about their jobs, fishing, fetching water, washing linen at the edge of the stream, all a little too graceful to be real. There is enough exact detail to suggest a real spot, possibly on the Seine west of Paris, and small patches of red clothing light up the silvery greens.