The Painter in His Studio

For a long time this little panel, about the size of a sheet of writing paper, was taken for a self-portrait. A painter sits in profile at his easel with his palette, a statue behind him, and it seemed natural to see the young Boucher at work. The Louvre is careful about the man and precise about the picture he is painting. The canvas on the easel is Boucher's own Neapolitan Shepherd, a composition known from an engraving, so whoever sits there is at work on a Boucher.

The museum places the panel between 1725 and 1730, when Boucher was in his twenties. It later belonged to Hubert Robert, the painter of ruins, and was sold from his estate in 1809. In 1869 the doctor Louis La Caze, a collector of French painting, left it to the Louvre.