Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain

Pastoral with a Couple Near a Fountain at the Wallace Collection (1749) is among the largest and most significant French Rococo paintings in any British collection, its monumental scale (259.5 × 198.6 cm) suited to the principal rooms of the grandest French hôtels particuliers. The Wallace Collection in London, assembled by the Marquesses of Hertford and their heir Sir Richard Wallace in Paris during the nineteenth century and left to the British nation in 1897, holds the finest collection of French eighteenth-century painting and decorative arts outside France. Boucher's pastoral subject — an attractive couple by an ornate garden fountain — combines the genre's characteristic elements: idealized peasant costume, an Arcadian landscape, a decorative architectural feature, and the suggestion of romantic encounter. The painting's presence in the Wallace Collection reflects the nineteenth-century English aristocracy's taste for French Rococo, which was then being rediscovered after decades of Neoclassical and Romantic disparagement.

Boucher renders the pastoral scene with warm, decorative colors and the soft, idealized forms of the mature Rococo. The elegant figures, the picturesque fountain, and the lush landscape create a charming vision of aristocratic pastoral fantasy.