Le Coucher du soleil

In January 1752 Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, commissioned Boucher to design a pair of tapestries for the king's bedroom at Bellevue, her new chateau near Paris. This canvas is the full-size model he painted for one of them. It shows Apollo, god of the sun, sinking into the sea at the end of day into the arms of the sea-nymph Thetis. Contemporaries read the flattery easily enough, with the sun god standing in for the king, coming home from his duties to a waiting Pompadour. The finished tapestries took three years to weave and were the most expensive things the Gobelins works produced. The painting itself later crossed to London, where it hangs in the Wallace Collection.