Le Lever du soleil

Boucher made this around 1752 as a full-size design, not a finished picture in its own right. It was a cartoon for the royal Gobelins works to weave into tapestry, ordered by Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis the Fifteenth and the most powerful patron of French taste in those years. The tapestries took three years on the loom and became the costliest things Gobelins had ever produced. Apollo, god of the sun, is handed the reins of his chariot to begin the day, an image that flatters Versailles and, some have read, Pompadour's own hand in guiding the king. She reclaimed the cartoons once the weaving was done, and this one hangs today above the staircase of a London house.