Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain

The shepherds here are borrowed from the Paris stage. In 1745 the playwright Charles-Simon Favart put on a pastoral pantomime, Les Vendanges de Tempe, in which a young shepherd feeds grapes to a shepherdess named Lisette, and Boucher, who designed for the theatre himself, lifted the moment more or less whole. He painted it in 1749 for Daniel-Charles Trudaine, a senior royal official, to hang in the grand salon of his country house near Fontainebleau. It stands nearly two and a half metres tall, so those small flirting figures sit inside a wall-sized landscape of trees, sky and a stone fountain. A companion piece with a bagpipe player was made to hang opposite it.