The Shepherd's Gifts, or The Nest

The Louvre gives this canvas two titles, The Shepherd's Gifts and The Nest, and both lead to the same small object. A young shepherd has brought a shepherdess a bird's nest. In French pastoral pictures of the time birds were a familiar sign of love, and a man handing a woman a bird meant she had caught his heart, so the people who first looked at this had no trouble reading the gift.

The museum dates the painting to around 1740. It belonged to Louis XV before 1773, and in that year the engraver Louis-Simon Lempereur published a print of it under the first title. Probably later in the century it was hung as a pair with another Boucher country scene from the royal collection.