A young lady holding a pug dog

A Young Lady Holding a Pug Dog at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (1740) combines two of Boucher's most characteristic portrait elements: a young woman of fashionable elegance and the companion dog that signified refined sensibility. Pug dogs had become fashionable in French and English aristocratic circles partly through their adoption by Masonic lodges (the Mops-Orden) and partly through their natural appeal as small, expressive companion animals suited to the intimate domestic life depicted in Rococo genre painting. The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds European works within a comprehensive Australian collection, its French eighteenth-century paintings acquired through the art market during the twentieth century as French Rococo gained international institutional recognition. The painting's arrival in Sydney demonstrates how broadly Italian and French Old Masters dispersed through the global art market after the Second World War, as European collections were sold and American and Antipodean museums built their holdings.

The portrait is rendered with luminous flesh tones that characterizes François Boucher's best work. Oil on canvas provides a rich ground for the subtle gradations of flesh tone and the textural contrasts between skin, fabric, and background that give the image its convincing presence.