The Embarkation: an 18th century costume piece

Bocion's Embarkation, painted in 1848, depicts an imagined eighteenth-century costume piece showing figures boarding a boat — a subject influenced by the French Rococo tradition of fetes galantes. Bocion's costume pieces, set in idealized lakeside settings, combine his naturalistic landscape observation with the decorative charm of eighteenth-century pastoral painting. This fusion of historical fantasy with local landscape was unusual among Swiss painters of his generation.

Bocion's oil-on-canvas technique renders the eighteenth-century figures with decorative charm while maintaining his characteristic sensitivity to the lakeside setting and atmospheric light. The composition balances the figural group with the landscape backdrop in a harmonious, intimate format.