Shepherd Boy Playing Bagpipes

A small shepherd boy sits playing the bagpipes, and his only listener is a little spaniel. Boucher painted him around 1754 on a canvas about half a metre high, and the same boy turns up again and again in other materials. Boucher etched the composition himself, and the engraver François-Antoine Aveline finished the plate and published it under the title L'Innocence. Another printmaker, Claude Augustin Duflos, put out a rougher version called Le Petit Pasteur, the little shepherd. The Gobelins, the royal tapestry works in Paris, used the motif in a series of tapestries known as Boucher's Children, and it was also made into a porcelain figure and adapted for the lid of a snuffbox. The painting itself belonged in the 19th century to Baron Adolphe de Rothschild in Paris. It later crossed to New York, and by 1928 it was owned by Alvan T. Fuller, a Boston car dealer who was then governor of Massachusetts. His foundation gave it to the museum in his memory in 1961.