A man, leaning with his arms, looking up

This small yet powerful study is a sketch for a figure in one of Boucher’s grandest masterpieces, The Setting of the Sun, in the Wallace Collection, London, inv. P486 (Ananoff, op. cit., 1976, II, no. 423, ill.; J. Hedley, François Boucher. Seductive Visions, London, 2004, pp. 105-115, fig. 83; S. Duffy and J. Hedley, The Wallace Collection’s Pictures. A Complete Catalogue, London, 2004, pp. 52-53, ill.). Together with the equally celebrated Rising of the Sun in the same collection (inv. P485), the picture was commissioned in 1752 as a cartoon for a tapestry in the King’s bedroom at the chateau of Bellevue, east of Paris. The man in the present study depicts a triton at lower left in the composition, looking up to Apollo. Several other drawings related to the composition survive, among them a famous sheet of a triton raising out of the sea and holding a conch in the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (inv. KK 9000; see P. Rosenberg in De Callot à Greuze. Dessins français des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles des musées de Weimar, exhib. cat., Weimar, Stiftung Weimarer Klassik und Kunstsammlungen, New York, The Frick Collection, and Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André, 2005-2006, no. 53, ill.). A study for the Apollo in the Rising of the Sun is in the National Gallery of Art, Wahington (inv. 1980.64.1; see M.M. Grasselli, Renaissance to Revolution. French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500-1800, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2009-2010, no. 52, ill.).