The Villagers Fishing

François Boucher was appointed First Painter to King Louis XV on 8 August 1765. A few months later, in the year 1766, even though it must have been a busy year for him with his trip to Holland in the company of his friend Randon de Boisset, he painted another pastoral, testifying to his contemporaries’ unflagging taste for such scenes. This, despite the fact that since c. 1745-1750, a painter such as Greuze, for instance, had been painting genre scenes with a moral content, an example of art with a didactic intent that embodied the spirit of the Enlightenment yet did not enjoy the same kind of favour with connoisseurs as Boucher’s pastorals had been enjoying for the past thirty years.

If the provenance from Monsieur de Montullé’s cabinet mentioned by the painting’s engraver is correct ¹, then the patron who commissioned it was a leading figure at court, none other than the First Secretary (Secrétaire des Commandements) to Queen Marie Leszczyńska. He and his wealthy wife began to put together a splendid collection of 17th and 18th century art in 1765, but a downturn in their fortunes compelled them to sell it some twenty years later. That was when The Villagers Fishing first appeared on the market, where it was bought by a certain Morel. The sale is indicative of Montullé ‘s admiration for Boucher and of the fact that he bought paintings of the highest quality from him, because his collection included another two landscapes by the painter, the head of a woman and, more importantly, the superb silk fan with Brother Philippe’s Geese now in the Musée des Beaux-arts de Besançon (inv. D. 2819), which Montullé had had from Jean de Jullienne. The Villagers Fishing was then apparently purchased at the turn of the 18th century by the painter Hubert Robert², who was putting together a collection of drawings and paintings by Boucher, from whom he drews inspiration for a number of his own figures. From there, it appears to have gone in the 1850s to the painter and restorer Simon Horsin-Déon, who sold it in 1868 at the same time as Going Fishing, also known as The Boatman’s Departure. The next we hear of it, it was for sale at the Galerie Charpentier in 1949. The Boatman’s Departure was sold in its turn by Charpentier in 1951, and the two paintings, which may have formed a false pair of companion pieces when they were in Hubert Robert’s collection and most certainly did so in the course of the 19th century, were reunited and resurfaced as companion pieces in the Cassel van Doorn sale in 1954.

The idea of filling imaginary landscapes with young peasants inspired by the repertoire of 17th century Flemish and Dutch artists, was first conceived by François Boucher in the 1730s on his return from Italy, in the wake of the small landscapes in the Flemish manner that he had painted in Rome in order to earn a living. These works were marked by his discovery of numerous drawings by Abraham Bloemaert in Arnold van Westerhout’s workshop in Rome. The figures of young men and women that he borrowed from Bloemaert were initially set amid Italianate ruins, but then c. 1734–5 the pictures that he started painting in France went from heroic landscapes with ruins and monuments to simpler, more rustic settings. And the figure of the fisherman began to appear in his work. Of the now dispersed series of four pictures known as “the Duke of Richelieu’s paintings”, A Peasant Boy Fishing in the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh (inv 1972-3, FIG. 1) depicts an initial fishing scene with a couple in an idyllic landscape setting, but while the umbrella pine still dominates the scenes, it has taken second place, like the Italian poplars and village, and the young couple inspired by Bloemaert now stands out in the foreground against a backdrop of timeless rocks and trees. The four pictures were painted c. 1735, and the others in the series effectively illustrate the artist’s gradual shift towards the pastoral: A Peasant Boy Fishing is just that, a first pastoral depicting a fishing theme, a seduction theme and a rustic landscape all in one, whereas the setting of its companion piece, the Rest at a Well (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), consists of particularly spectacular ruins, and the other two paintings, the Vegetable Vendor (Norfolk, Chrysler Museum of Art) and the Rural Idyll (Munich, Alte Pinakothek), are full of rustic items conjuring up an image of everyday life in the country³. The couple of fisherfolk painted c. 1735 forms a motif to which the artist was to return throughout the rest of his career, while he abandoned a large watercolour drawing on which he was working at the same time, entitled Fishermen at the foot of a tower in a landscape, on the grounds that it was excessively rustic, and he failed to complete a drawing for a tapestry entitled Village fairs in the Italian style which, in the event, was never made.

While Boucher, «excellent in landscapes» returned to drawing in the open air in Charenton, Arcueil and Beauvais in the 1740s, child or adult fishermen started to become a regular presence in his drawings and paintings, being fully formalised by the time he painted The Little Fisherman for the salon of 1743 and the Landscape with a Pond in 1746⁴. Fishing was an activity associated with peasant life and had had a more rustic connotation than hunting ever since the Middle Ages: «The vocabulary of pleasure also designates it as a leisure activity»⁵. At the beginning of the 18th century, we see it putting in an anecdotic appearance in genre scenes foreshadowing the pastoral genre that Boucher was to formalise shortly thereafter. While Watteau’s work shows no sign of it, it appears among the rustic divertissements painted by Oudry for the King’s steward Louis Fagon in 1723. It is one of eight pictures painted for his château of Voré and now in the Musée du Louvre, the others being Music, The Hunt, Burlesque Comedy, The Repast, Gaming, Strolling and Resting. Revealing changing tastes and the imminent fall from favour of large historical subjects, these scenes clearly foreshadow those that Boucher was to start painting ten years later. They all take their cue from the new sources of inspiratoin that we find, like an echo, in André Campra’s Venetian Festivities performed for the first time in 1710 and repeated without a break until well into the 1760s on account of their immense popularity.

Thirty years after The Happy Fisherman, François Boucher was once again commissioned to paint a pastoral subject with fishermen. Against a seemingly serene backdrop, and allowing for the picture’s oval format, he brought together in a kind of closed circle three figures fishing, or rather, two women watching the precise moment when the young fisherman catches a fish. His left hand, commanding, appears to be calling for silence, thus underscoring and further expanding the tension in the figure whose right arm is so outstretched that he is almost losing his balance. The line formed by his arm crosses the entire composition, continuing with the line of the fishing rod and standing out against the silent, calm watery backdrop. The whole composition pivots on the tension created by the figures’ gazes (including that of the cow), all pointing in the same direction in a scene that is at once peaceful and intimate. The cow, inspired by those of Potter, is the humorous detail and the detail that lends the scene a degree of familiarity and, in some ways, a certain accessibility, while all the figures appear to be totally unaware that they are being observed, or else totally indifferent to those observing them. The instant is captured «on the fly», as it were, in all its simplicity and immediacy. It is as though, united by the same tension, the silent group were self-engrossed, the dabs of red confirming and supporting this contention and highlighting, by contrast, all the shades of grey: the grey of their costumes, of the water, of the rocks and of the glittering, silvery leaves on the willow tree.

The two women lend the picture its only notes of warmth. Their pose is important, particularly that of the young woman seen from behind seated in the foreground, almost in the middle of the painting, urging the observer to join in the scene despite his better judgment. These figures seen from behind are one of the ploys to which Boucher resorted with the greatest frequently. They escape our observation, as indeed do those shown asleep and thus part of a world to which the observer does not have access. Boucher worked for the theatre for a long time and often chose to conceal his figures’ faces and to turn their gazes away, as though in some kind of game on stage, thus leaving us free to construct whatever image we choose to put on the figure turning its back on us. This ploy allowed him both to place a certain a distance between the observer and the painting itself, and to prompt the observer to start asking questions.

The scene depicted here has no real subject matter. It seems to belong to everyday life, while having been elegantly transformed to please the eye. The two young people in it are timeless; only the woman shown in profile wears a headscarf setting her firmly in the 1760s. Yet certain choices in this seemingly simply landscape, clearly created in the workshop, deserve closer investigation. The trees in the background, naturally juxtaposed with one another, are the same as those we see in all his landscapes painted in those years. They were composed in his workshop with such convincing elegance and so perfect a handling of light that one would think they had been painted from life. Standing out against a clear and luminous sky, the trees underscore the group’s cohesion and its peaceful intimacy. In the middle ground, however, just behind the young people, the wind seems to be sweeping and lifting the leaves on the willow tree and bending the rushes, drawing the eye towards the old, tortured willow with its gnarled trunk whose silhouette is reminiscent of a fine coeval study of a willow tree now in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (inv. 1951 -319). The presence of the gnarled tree serves, by contrast, to highlight the young, perfectly straight trees immersed in the water that occupy the rest of the middle ground, providing the scene with a bizarre boundary. The motif of the trees immersed in water, a rare device in Boucher’s work, echoes certain of his youthful pictures, such as the Landscape with Washerwomen and a Horseman and Crossing the Ford, and is directly inspired by the woodland scenes of Anthonie Waterloo and Jacob van Ruysdael⁶. With it, this pastoral scene, seemingly so easy to grasp and so sophisticated in its construction, suddenly becomes bizarre, as though the artist were trying to imbue it with some kind of meaning now lost on us. This may well account for the rather nostalgic charm it now exudes. A mirror-image engraving of the picture was made by René Gaillard during François Boucher’s lifetime and announced in La Gazette de France on 4 August 1769, in the L’Avant-Coureur on 14 August and in the September edition of Le Mercure de France. It is rectangular, whereas the painting is oval, but then that was often the case, especially if the engraver worked in the artist’s workshop (FIG. 2).

It is interesting to note that in the course of that same year, 1766, François Boucher offered another version of the same subject to Monsieur Vassal de St Hubert, and that he replicated that second version in a cartoon for a tapestry in 1767. While he reused the young man seated and the peasant girl shown in profile wearing a headscarf from the painting under discussion here, he opened up the landscape completely and linked them to the young girl standing, a figure strongly inspired by the girl he had painted for the Hôtel de Richelieu (FIG. 1) thirty years earlier, thus lending this fishing scene a far more serene and peaceful aura than that in the painting under discussion. The cartoon for Fishing is currently on display in the “Salon des Nobles de la Reine” in Versailles (Inv. MV 7096).