Halt at the Spring

Halt at the Spring (1765), in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, is a late pastoral painting depicting figures resting beside a spring in an idyllic rural setting. The painting demonstrates Boucher's continued mastery of pastoral subjects even in his later years, when his style was increasingly out of step with the growing taste for Neoclassical severity. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston's European collection includes important French works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Executed with decorative elegance and attention to sensuous brushwork, the work reveals François Boucher's characteristic approach to composition and surface. The treatment of light and the careful modulation of color create visual richness within a unified pictorial scheme.