Pan and Syrinx

Ovid tells how the nymph Syrinx ran from the god Pan until she reached a river, where the water nymphs turned her into reeds. Pan, left holding a handful of rushes, cut them into the pipes that still carry her name. Boucher paints the moment before. Pan pushes his face through the reeds, and the plants she is about to become are already growing all around him. Syrinx lies pressed against a river nymph, seen from behind and leaning on an overturned urn, and she seems as taken with her companion as with the god. Above them a cupid lifts a torch and an arrow, the tokens of desire. He signed this small canvas in 1759, and its first owner was the king's principal valet. In his Salon reviews of the 1760s the critic Denis Diderot would attack his pictures for exactly this frivolity and these loose morals.