Landscape

Landscape at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Narbonne (1740) is one of Boucher's pure landscape paintings — a dimension of his output frequently overshadowed by his more famous mythological and pastoral figure compositions but demonstrating an independent sensitivity to the countryside of northern France. In 1740 Boucher was forty-seven years old and at the height of his powers, producing mythological paintings for Pompadour's residences while simultaneously working on tapestry designs for Beauvais and landscape studies for his own creative development. The Narbonne museum, one of France's oldest public art museums, holds French paintings alongside important Roman and early Christian archaeological material reflecting the city's ancient history. Boucher's landscape paintings tend toward the decorative rather than the topographically accurate, the countryside observed from his journeys to Beauvais and the Île-de-France filtered through his compositional instincts into something more charming than documentary.

The landscape is rendered with Boucher's characteristic warm palette and decorative sensibility. The handling creates a pastoral scene of Rococo charm.