Fontaine avec deux amours dont l'un est agenouillé

Fountain with Two Cupids, One Kneeling (c. 1730s), in the Musée Carnavalet, is a companion to the other fountain-and-cupid painting, designed as part of a decorative ensemble for an aristocratic interior. Boucher produced numerous such decorative works throughout his career. François Boucher, the most celebrated French painter of the mid-eighteenth century and First Painter to Louis XV, produced an enormous output of paintings, tapestry designs, stage sets, and decorative objects that defined the visual culture of the Rococo. His characteristic qualities — warm flesh tones, soft light, the sensuous beauty of fabrics and surfaces, the celebration of the female form in mythological and pastoral settings — served the aristocratic and royal taste of pre-Revolutionary France with a consistency and quality that made him the defining visual voice of the Ancien Régime at its most pleasurable. His influence on the subsequent French tradition, particularly through Fragonard and the decorative arts, made him foundational to French aesthetic culture.

François Boucher employs luminous flesh tones and pastel palette to convey the spiritual gravity of the subject. The treatment of the figures shows careful study of earlier masters, while the palette and lighting create the devotional atmosphere the subject demands.