Going Fishing

Going Fishing, viewed today as the companion piece of The Villagers Fishing¹, shares with that painting both its dimensions and its oval format. Though painted ten years apart, the two pictures illustrate the peaceful, rustic activity that is fishing, a theme much revisited by François Boucher after 1735. In what are still unknown circumstances, the celebrated landscape painter Hubert Robert, an enthusiastic collector of the paintings and drawings of Boucher, whom he had known since the 1750s, may have arbitrarily put the two paintings together for the first time towards the end of the 18th century. In any event, they subsequently appear without question in the collection of a painter named Simon Horsin-Déon, who restored paintings and provided expertises for various museums in the mid-19th century, and appeared in the sale of his collection in March 1868 under the nos. 2 and 3, yet without being considered companion pieces in any way. This is probably on account of their different dates, though that detail is not mentioned in the descriptions in the booklet accompanying the sale². No. 2, The Villagers Fishing, is described thus: «Fishing – In a wooded landscape watered by a small river a young boy has taken up a position close to the water’s edge to fish in the company of a pretty peasant girl seated next to him; she already holds a fish in her hand, and he, half-recumbent on a knoll has just cast his line. They are both awaiting a new catch, their wait shared by a third figure, a lovely peasant girl standing behind them, her elbow leaning on a cow and holding a basket full of vegetables in her hand. A small tub almost submerged in the mud, a wooden begging bowl, a log lying on the ground and a kind of shed roofed in thatch built among the picturesquely scattered trees, form a group which, taken together with the exquisitely fresh palette, brings joy to the soul and moves it to entertain pleasurable thoughts». This painting is no. 3: «The Boatman – A river flows at the foot of the terraced walls of an ancient castle reached by a rustic bridge. A boat laden with nets and with the family of the fisherman steering it occupies the foreground. The subject is very simple yet under Boucher’s brush it acquires infinite charm because he has proven capable with his art of crowning these old walls with trees and shrubs; of introducing variety into the left-hand side of the painting by adding a kind of lock made of planks and old timber. And finally, our full attention should be drawn to the charming group of the fisherman’s young wife and children, before whom a small puppy is barking». The two paintings are oval in format, but in neither case is there any mention of a signature or a date. In the booklet, Horsin -Déon lists a provenance that it has not been possible to verify because he tells us that he made «his best purchases – thus perhaps these two paintings – in Paris in 1849 and ’50, [and that he bought] among other things, the best pictures still in the possession of Mr. Dubois, a former dealer of the greatest repute».

In their present format, this painting and its companion piece sit pleasingly together and appear to belong to the “pastoral” genre which Boucher invented and proposed to connoisseurs, combining Flemish landscapes, elegant figures drawn from Watteau, Italian landscapes and the wooded countryside of the Île de France. He began to produce these popular pastorals in 1735. Louis Moreri, in his Grand dictionnaire historique published in 1732, at the very moment Boucher was completing his early pastorals for the King’s apartments in the château of Fontainebleau and in the Village Fairs in the Italian Style, a tapestry for Beauvais, describes a pastoral thus: «a poem in which one depicts shepherds, hunters, fishermen, gardeners, labourers, satyrs, nymphs and all manner of rustic figures. One hears nothing but lovers’ cries, shepherds’ cruelty, singing contests, satyrs springing traps, ravishing nymphs and other similar adventures. […] The Italians, and the French after them, have put pastorals on stage in the theatre»³. François Boucher frequently uses water to add a magical touch to these scenes unfolding in dreamlike landscapes. Whether it sits sleepily under the cover of trees, splashes out of a fountain, rushes through rocks or simply, as here, flows clear and peaceful yet with a current strong enough to sail by, water often takes pride of place in his work, because its mirror-like effect met his taste for changing forms and forms inverted in a reflection.

But while the association of the two paintings is immediately satisfying at first sight, substantial differences can be detected very clearly in both their conception and their execution, forcing us, despite their harmony, to place them in two distinct registers, the pastoral and the landscape. The Villagers Fishing stages young men and girls seen close up, arranged in a closed circle in a sealed environment with light striking them from above. With its large ruined wall, a frequent feature in all the painter’s early pictures which, astonishingly, resurfaces here, and its monumental gate which, on the contrary, is a first in any of his work, Going Fishing, despite its narrow format, shows us first and foremost a landscape, and a heroic one rather than a rustic one at that, on account of the imposing nature of the buildings it contains. In technical terms, the trees are rendered in a similarly sophisticated manner in both paintings, and the same silvery light effects strike the water, but in this painting the water is transparent and clear, beneath a light that does not fall on the figures from above but comes from the back of the painting, suggesting an open horizon that we sense is there on the right. The brushwork is generous in The Villagers Fishing while it is, on the contrary, precious and refined, almost restrained, in Going Fishing. The figures in the latter picture are distant, barely applied with the tip of the brush, anecdotic for all their elegance, their small size emphasising, by contrast, the importance of the landscape. Thanks to a ploy that Boucher frequently adopted, a number of discreet connections between the figures and the decor also prompt us to notice the breadth of the landscape well before we become aware of the scene from everyday life that would be the central feature of a pastoral. Here we note the bark of the dog on the river bank and the barely sketched boy leaning on the wooden railing of the footbridge, whose small size in the distance implicitly increases the distances in the picture. This motif of a boy or young onlooker leaning on a bridge was a recurrent theme in Boucher ever since his earliest landscapes recreated in his workshop on the basis of sketches made from life; we find it, for instance, in the View of Tivoli in the Musée du Louvre drawn in black lead for Jean de Jullienne c. 1735 (inv. 24800): leaning discreetly, barely hinted at, he defines the background’s size and lends the action a certain naive realism.

So this is first and foremost a landscape, in which small figures have been added to a composition produced, in part at least, from life and initially devised as a self-standing landscape without figures. The Musée du Louvre (inv. 34719) and the Courtauld Institute in London (Inv D 1952 RW 3439) own rare examples of such landscapes, which are preparatory drawings for pictures initially devised without figures. The painting was subsequently enlivened by young peasants, on whom Boucher has placed his customary touch of red to bolster their presence. The boat also highlights the fact that we are looking at what is primarily a landscape. Starting in the 1740s, François Boucher often depicted boats, because they allowed him to introduce a human presence and to animate his landscapes without having any real impact on the natural environment, and they helped to forge an artificial link between the figure(s) in the boat and the figure(s) stranded on the bank or the bridge, in this instance a puppy and a boy. As though added as an afterthought, laden with one or more figures, his boats frequently and inexplicably appear to be too large for the landscape. We can see this already in one of his earliest drawings from life, in black lead with white chalk highlights, dated 1739–40, when he began to work in the open air just as he had done in Italy ten years earlier, travelling to Charenton, Beauvais or Arcueil. This View of the Mill at Charenton (Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts Graphiques, inv. 31494), so natural that in the 19th century it was attributed to Oudry, was finished in the workshop and reused in several paintings. It, too, has a boat and a fisherman in the foreground. A View of the Countryside around Beauvais, famous for being one of the first landscapes that Boucher showed at the Salon in Paris in 1742, also has, in the foreground, a boat in which a young woman is about to clamber and, more importantly, the same puppy dog that we see in the picture under discussion here (St. Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum, inv. 5734). Until the very end of his life, Boucher invariably built a boat with one or more figures into his drawn and painted landscapes. See, for example, his Landscape with a Watermill, a black lead drawing now in the museum in Frankfurt (inv 1227), or his Landscape with a Watermill in the museum in Linköping (inv B 345), both of them very late works⁴.

If it is indeed a landscape drawn at least partly from life, that would mean that the medieval gate on the left-hand side of the painting is real. It is an extremely rare subject in Boucher’s work and bears no resemblance to the customary watermills or pigeon coops he devised. In fact, it appears in this painting alone, portrayed in different ways, in different sizes and using different techniques. Three late 18th century engravings made by two of François Boucher’s contemporaries who knew him well, show the same gate, the same walls and the same wooden footbridge, yet all three of them reproduce a rectangular painting completed on the right by a small fisherman on the opposite bank of the river in front of some thatched cottages and rocks. One of the engravings is the work of Pierre-François Basan and is entitled “View from Life drawn by François Boucher n°1 bis”, while the other two are by the Abbé de St Non, a friend of Fragonard (FIG. 1)⁵. Thanks to the good Abbé, we know from his engraving of 1777, which was intended to be part of the Griffonis⁶, that it is a view of the countryside around Beauvais. This may mean that it was inspired by the city walls in the vicinity of the tapestry manufactory, of which we can legitimately surmise that Boucher made a (now lost) drawing c. 1755. Bound by the same contract as Oudry, François Boucher did indeed visit Beauvais from time to time, because he had been the manufactory’s painter since 1734-1735, and he drew inspiration from the city walls for his drawings and paintings on more than one occasion. He ceased collaborating with the manufactory precisely around 1755-1756 in order to work for the rival Gobelins manufactory, in response to a request from the Service des Bâtiments du Roi. The Abbé de St Non, the artist who made the engraving and who was a friend of Fragonard – himself a pupil of Boucher in those very same years – tells us that the painting hung in the Dauphin’s chamber in Versailles. It so happens that in 1756 Boucher was commissioned to paint four overdoors with landscapes for the Dauphin’s private cabinet in Versailles. Two of them were delivered, but were very rapidly moved out of the private apartments, the «picture of a landscape depicting fishermen» ending up in 1760 in the offices of the Surintendance des Bâtiments⁷; today, these paintings can no longer be precisely identified⁸.

The picture under discussion here is thus an autograph replica of the left-hand side of the large landscape painted for the Dauphin. Signed and dated the same year, it was made by the artist himself in an oval format which a connoisseur probably insisted he adopt. Testifying to the composition’s immense popularity, Boucher also reproduced it in a gouache on vellum for another connoisseur (FIG. 2).

Two complete versions, displaying differences both between each other and with the engravings, may be seen today in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Narbonne (Inv LB3, FIG. 3)⁹ and in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Strasbourg (FIG. 4).