Cleveland Museum of Art

Pastries, Talmouses, All Hot

François Boucher

Date

c. 1737

Medium

black and red chalks on paper

Culture

France

Department

Drawings

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

François Boucher made the drawing as a print design for a series depicting Parisian tradespeople, titled the Cris de Paris (Criers of Paris), which consisted of 12 plates. Subjects in the series included this vendor of hot pastries and cheese puffs as well as a variety of other vendors such as a knife grinder, broom seller, chimney sweep, and vegetable seller. Boucher was known primarily for images epitomizing the elegant court life of France—nudes, decorative compositions, and pastorals—rather than so-called “low life” subjects such as street vendors. Boucher’s series struck a chord with the growing middle-class print-buying public in France, with its designs migrating to a variety of decorative arts and porcelain figurines. Despite its subject of a street vendor, Boucher’s composition retains some of the courtly artificiality of his age, with an elegantly dressed young gentleman and unkempt baker’s apprentice whose pose is nonetheless balletic, like a dancer at a courtly fête.

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