Getty Museum

Landscape with Figures

Creator

French Artist · 1703–1770

Designer

For François Boucher, "art" meant "artifice." He could paint straightforward genre scenes and portraits when appropriate, but the times called for enchantment and frolic, with just the right touch of titillation. Boucher's paintings and drawings celebrated a silvery, shimmering world of perfumes and powders, inspiring copies of his designs in media ranging from textiles and marquetry to porcelain.

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Date: about 1726–1728
Medium: Red chalk, on vellum
Culture: French
Department: Drawings
Institution: Getty Museum

In this early landscape, François Boucher aimed to create picturesque, poetic effects rather than fidelity to nature. To anchor his lush foliage of energetic chalk strokes, he built a strong underpinning of a winding road and solid buildings and filled the scene with props and details. The drawing is probably his only landscape on vellum. Boucher may have made this drawing, along with *Reclining Guitar Player,* for his first tapestry series for the Beauvais Tapestry Manufactory. He designed this series, *Les fêtes italiennes,* between 1734 and 1746, and Beauvais produced and sold more copies of this tapestry series than any other. Before the Getty Museum purchased the drawing, the second Earl Spencer owned it.

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