Il trionfo di Venere

Boucher showed this at the Paris Salon of 1740, and it was already spoken for. The buyer was Carl Gustaf Tessin, Sweden's ambassador in Paris, a sharp collector busy shipping French art and taste back to Stockholm. He got a full display of Boucher at his most sensual, Venus rising from a calm sea on a cloud of pink flesh, with sea nymphs and tritons crowding the water around her and doves wheeling overhead. Tessin's fortunes did not hold. Deep in debt, he had to sell much of his collection to the Swedish crown in 1749, which is how a picture made for a private Paris apartment became a royal painting, still in the gilt frame Boucher's contemporaries first saw it in.