child at a well in a garden

Children at play or at fountains appeared throughout Boucher's work as vehicles for the kind of innocent, decorative charm that characterized the Rococo's approach to childhood — not the child as moral subject or religious symbol, but as an embodiment of pleasure and visual delight. The garden well setting placed the figure within the tradition of the fête galante and the pastoral garden subject that ran through his teacher Lemoyne and back to Watteau, though Boucher's gardens are more overtly architectural and less atmospherically ambiguous than Watteau's. Works like this were produced for decorative programs in private hotels and royal residences.

The child figure is rendered in Boucher's warm, rosy flesh tones against the cooler stone of the well and the greens of garden vegetation. The composition is organized to display the garden architecture as well as the figure, with Boucher's decorative sensibility evident in the treatment of foliage, stone, and fabric as coordinated chromatic elements.