The Sacrifice of Gideon

In 1723, aged 20, Boucher won the Royal Academy's first prize for painting, the award that normally came with a place at the French Academy in Rome. The place never materialised. For several years he stayed in Paris making a living from engraving and illustration, and only in 1728 did he get to Italy, paying his own way.

The Louvre dates this canvas to between 1725 and 1730, the stretch when he was still trying to prove himself as a painter of grand religious and historical subjects. It is an unusual choice for him, an Old Testament story rather than a myth. In the Book of Judges, Gideon is threshing wheat in hiding from raiders when an angel appears and tells him he will deliver Israel. Gideon asks for a sign and brings out meat and unleavened cakes. The angel touches them with the tip of his staff, fire leaps from the rock and eats up the offering, and the angel is gone.

The tall canvas, about one and a quarter metres high, was given to the Louvre in 1983, though the donor kept the use of it until 1997.