The Love Letter
François Boucher·1750
Historical Context
The Love Letter at the National Gallery of Art (1750) belongs to a distinctly Rococo genre that had no precise equivalent in earlier European art — the painting of women reading or writing love letters, which combined the theme of amorous communication with the depiction of feminine beauty in intimate domestic settings. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin had recently established the genre scene as a serious mode of French painting; Boucher adapted it to his more decorative, less austere sensibility, creating a version that maintained the social observation of genre while wrapping it in the visual luxury of Rococo aesthetics. The love letter as object carried rich cultural weight in eighteenth-century France, where written correspondence was a highly cultivated art form and where private romantic communication existed in complex tension with public social performance. The National Gallery's French collection includes this among the significant works that document the range of Boucher's output beyond mythology and pastoral.
Technical Analysis
The figure is rendered with Boucher's characteristic idealized elegance, posed in a carefully arranged compositional setting. The paper of the letter catches light with convincing detail, and the surrounding decorative elements create the refined atmosphere typical of his genre scenes.
Look Closer
- ◆The woman holds the letter in one hand while her other rests pensively at her cheek — Boucher capturing the arrested concentration of reading private correspondence.
- ◆Her satin dress in pale blue-grey is rendered with the characteristic complexity Boucher brought to luxury textile depiction.
- ◆A small table bears objects of feminine domesticity — a ribbon, a few flowers — establishing the intimate private setting.
- ◆The neutral background focuses attention entirely on the figure's absorbed expression, making the letter's emotional content felt without being read.
Provenance
Painted for Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour [1721-1764], and installed in the _chambre doré_ on the first [i.e., second] floor of the Château de Bellevue, outside Paris; removed c. 1757; recorded 1764 in the vestibule of the ground floor of the Hôtel d'Evreux, Pompadour's Parisian residence; by inheritance to her brother, Abel François Poisson, marquis de Ménars et de Marigny [1727-1781], Château de Ménars, Paris; (his estate sale, at his residence by Basan and Joullain, Paris, 18 March-6 April 1782 [postponed from late February], no. 17). (sale, Hôtel des Commissaires-Priseurs, Paris, 14-15 March 1842, no. 15). (anonymous sale ["Provenant du Cabinet de M. X***], Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 26 April 1861, no. 2). Emile [1800-1875] and Isaac [1806-1880] Pereire, Paris; (Péreire sale, at their residence by Pillet and Petit, Paris, 6-9 March 1872, no. 57, as _Le Mouton chéri_ or _Le messager_); purchased by Sommier, possibly for Frédéric-Alexis-Louis Pillet-Will, comte Pillet [1837-1911], Paris.[1] (Wildenstein & Co., Inc., Paris, New York, and London); sold to William R. Timken [1866-1949], New York, by 1932;[2] by inheritance to his widow, Lillian Guyer Timken [1881-1959], New York; bequest 1960 to NGA. [1] Alexandre Ananoff, with Daniel Wildenstein, _François Boucher_, 2 vols., Lausanne and Paris, 1976: 2:66, no. 364, list the painting as being in the collection of comte Pillet Will "c. 1906" (his name is more correctly comte Pillet, although the surname was Pillet-Will). However, the comte purchased other paintings at the Péreire sale, including Fragonard's _A Game of Horse and Rider_ (NGA 1946.7.5), so it is possible he purchased this Boucher through Sommier at the same time. [2] The Timkens lent the painting to a 1932 exhibition in London. Correspondence in the Duveen Brothers Records indicates that the Timkens were considering, reluctantly, selling the painting in 1937 (Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, accession number 960015, reel 235, box 380, folder 4; copies in NGA curatorial files).
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