FRANÇOIS BOUCHER | L'ENFANT BERGER

Possibly Nicolas Joseph Bergeret de Grancourt;

sale, London, Christie's, 16 April 1991, part of lot 61 (as Circle of Francois Boucher)

This delightful sheet, full of Rococo whimsy, corresponds in reverse to a chalk-manner print, titled L'enfant berger (fig.1), executed by Gilles Demarteau after a Boucher drawing in the collection of Nicolas Joseph Bergeret de Grancourt. The direct correspondence between Demarteau's print, which is signed and dated 1770, and the present sheet is particularly striking, with Alastair Laing tentatively suggesting that the present drawing may indeed be the original work, once owned by Bergeret de Grancourt.

The composition, depicting a little shepherd boy playing the bagpipes to a small dog, is also known in three other formats, including an etching by Boucher that was subsequently completed as an engraving by F.A. Aveline, titled L'innocence,¹ as well as a coarser interpretation known as Le Petit Pasteur,² by Claude Augustin Duflos le Jeune. A painted version by Boucher, Shepherd Boy Playing Bagpipes,³ in the same orientation as our drawing, is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where it is dated to circa 1754.

We are grateful to Alastair Laing for endorsing the attribution of the present work to Boucher on the basis of photographs, and for his help in the cataloging of this lot.

1. See P. Jean-Richard, Inventaire général des gravures: École française. vol. I: L'Oeuvre gravé de François Boucher dans la Collection Edmond de Rothschild, Paris 1978, pp. 76-77, no. 196, reproduced

2. An impression of this print is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. no. 53.600.1028

3. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. no. 61.958