A fashionable young woman is lying on a daybed in a carefully staged room, where every small object suggests something about the subject of the painting. Sofas and daybeds were a new invention in the eighteenth century, at a time when Parisian society was becoming increasingly used to socializing in private homes, drinking coffee and enjoying the pleasures of conversation.
There is a letter and a book, the contents of which are inaccessible to us. Drawers are half-open, half-closed, suggesting intimacy and secrecy at the same time. On the wall-mounted shelf in the background is an Asian porcelain statuette, a “magot,” as these types of works were known. Under a teapot and a cup is another letter, signed by Boucher.
Boucher married Marie-Jeanne Buzeau, when he was 33 and she was just 17, and, according to contemporary sources, it was a love match. Also a painter, Marie-Jeanne made miniatures after her husband’s paintings and signed etchings. She also modeled for him, at a time when the Academy would not allow artists to sketch from female models. Madame Boucher has been previously thought to be the subject of this painting, but this canvas is instead part of a small series of genre scenes with erotic overtones—cabinet paintings, designed for the consumption of male patrons and collectors.
A Lady on Her Day Bed
When Marie-Jeanne Buzeau (1716–after 1786) posed so pertly for this informal portrait ten years after her marriage to Boucher, she was twenty-seven and the mother of three children. She frequently served as model for her husband, and in later life she painted miniature reproductions of his more popular pictures and made engravings after his drawings. Besides offering such a candid image of the artist’s wife, the portrait provides a fascinating glimpse of a room in the apartment to which Boucher had moved the year before he signed this canvas on the rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré. The porcelain figurine and tea service on the hanging étagère reflect Boucher’s taste for the Oriental bric-a-brac so fashionable throughout the eighteenth century. In its composition the portrait is a witty parody of the classical Renaissance depictions of Venus by Giorgione and Titian, and as such the picture has acquired the sobriquet “Boucher's Untidy Venus.”
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Joseph Bardac. D. David-Weill, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris; Wildenstein. Frick, 1937.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: French, Italian and Spanish. Volume II. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
