Berger gardant ses moutons

Shepherd Guarding His Sheep at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen (1744) depicts a pastoral subject from Boucher's most productive decade — a lone shepherd with his flock in an idealized rural landscape. The solitary shepherd was a figure with deep cultural resonance in the pastoral tradition stretching from Theocritus and Virgil through Tasso's Aminta and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender to the eighteenth-century pastoral vogue: the shepherd as a figure of simple wisdom, natural virtue, and uncomplicated emotional life that stood as an implicit critique of courtly sophistication. Boucher's treatment, of course, reversed this critical dimension: his shepherds are beautiful, elegantly dressed, and clearly inhabitants of an Arcadia that never knew real poverty or labor. The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen holds French and Flemish paintings within a collection that suffered significant damage during the Second World War bombing of the city, rebuilding its collection through purchases and loans in the postwar decades.

The pastoral scene is rendered with warm palette and decorative handling. Boucher's treatment creates an idyllic vision of country life.