Sketch for a Portrait of Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764)

Sketch for a Portrait of Madame de Pompadour at Waddesdon Manor (1750) is a preparatory oil sketch for one of Boucher's major Pompadour portraits, showing the painter's initial working out of the composition before the definitive version was completed. Such sketches — bozzetti in the Italian term — were sometimes valued by collectors as documents of the creative process, showing the artist's thinking in a more immediate, less finished form than the final painting. Waddesdon's French Rococo collection provides an ideal context for this sketch, which documents Boucher's working method at the moment when his relationship with Pompadour was at its most productive. The preparatory nature of the work gives it historical importance beyond its aesthetic merit: it allows scholars to trace the development from initial conception to finished portrait within the series of Boucher-Pompadour images that constituted the most important sustained portrait commission of French Rococo painting.

The sketch shows Boucher's confident handling in the preparatory stage. The warm palette and elegant composition anticipate the finished portrait.