Jupiter and Callisto

Jupiter and Callisto at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (1744) is one of Boucher's most accomplished treatments of the Ovidian subject, the large scale (98 × 72 cm) allowing for the full development of his compositional and coloristic strengths. The Pushkin Museum, founded in 1912 as the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, holds European painting acquired both before and after the Russian Revolution, including works nationalized from private collections and others purchased through the Soviet state's art acquisition programs. French eighteenth-century painting entered Russian collections in quantity during Catherine the Great's systematic purchasing campaigns, and the Pushkin's French holdings document this historical connection. Boucher's treatment of the Jupiter-Callisto myth is one of his most sophisticated: the ambiguity of the two apparently female figures — one being Jupiter in disguise — gives the composition a level of knowing erotic complexity that suited his most cultivated patrons.

Boucher renders the two figures with luminous, pearly flesh tones in a lush woodland setting. The soft, decorative palette and the elegant intertwining of the bodies exemplify the refined eroticism of the French Rococo at its most accomplished.