Return from Market

When this canvas went on show at the Paris Salon of 1769, the printed catalogue gave it another title. It was listed as a march of Bohemians, the word the French then used for Romani travellers, or a caravan in the manner of Benedetto Castiglione. Castiglione was a 17th-century painter from Genoa known for long processions of herdsmen and animals on the move, and Boucher took up that idea of a whole company travelling across the land. Sheep and lambs, oxen and donkeys crowd in among the figures, and a bridge carries the road through the landscape. Boucher is reported to have complained that nature was too green and badly lit, and this countryside is his own arrangement, with clouds, draperies, animals and people woven together in one rhythm. The picture is huge, more than two metres tall and nearly three wide, and he signed it on a stone at lower left, F. Boucher, 1767. The Salon of 1769 was the last of his life. He died the following May.