François Boucher

This highly decorative drawing by Mme de Pompadour's favorite artist might seem to have been intended as an independent work to be framed and enjoyed in the "salon" or "boudoir". In fact, as Regina Slatkin has pointed out, Boucher made these studies in connection with "Saint John the Baptist and a Glory of Angels", a painting from the 1750s now in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (For a reproduction of this painting, see Versailles and elsewhere, 2002-2003, no. 67.) Some of the cherubs, notably the pair at the left and one of the cherubs at the center of the page, appear in a cloud and tree-shaded glory above Saint John, Mme de Pompadour's patron saint.
Boucher also used the right pair of cherubs in this drawing in the upper left corner of a second painting, "Le sommeil de l'enfant Jésus" (1758), now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. (see Ananoff and Wildenstein, 1976, II, no. 498).
Regina Slatkin drew attention to the old inscription "f. Boucher" and a paraph which appears at the lower left margin of the Morgan sheet. The inscription and paraph apparently occur together on a number of Boucher's finest drawings and may be that of Pierre Remy, the well-known expert and marchand d'art, who oversaw most of the finest Parisian sales in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Another version of the cherubs, also in trois crayons but executed on blue paper appeared at Hôtel Drouot in Paris twice during the 1980s, on 27 November 1986, lot 21, repr., and 3 January 1988. lot 14, repr. Attributed to François Boucher, this almost exact copy is slightly smaller than the present sheet (283 x 245 mm) and has no inscription and paraph.
Curatorial remarks by Cara Dufour Denison.