Virgin and Child

Virgin and Child at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1767) is one of Boucher's late religious paintings, depicting the fundamental Christian devotional image through the Rococo aesthetic that characterized all his work regardless of subject. Religious paintings were rare in Boucher's output — his Catholic faith was not publicly prominent, and his patrons primarily wanted secular decorative subjects — making this late devotional work somewhat anomalous. By 1767 Boucher was sixty-four, Premier Peintre du Roi, and producing fewer works than in his peak decades. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young and Legion of Honor) hold French eighteenth-century works within a comprehensive collection of European and American art. This late Madonna treats the sacred subject with the same visual warmth and physical beauty that characterized Boucher's secular nymphs — not irreverently, but in a way that assimilates the divine to the aesthetic values he maintained throughout his career.

Soft modeling and warm, rosy flesh tones treat the sacred subject with the same sensuous delicacy Boucher applied to his mythological figures. The intimate scale and tender interaction between mother and child emphasize domesticity over divinity.