A female nude, half-length

Acquired from Galerie Cailleux, Paris, in 1970 by Russell and Annie-Laurie Aitken, this lovely female head by Boucher is little-known and has been rarely seen. When it was exhibited in 1964, Jean Cailleux described it as a study for a larger composition, perhaps one of the Graces in L’Amour enchaîné par les Grâces, known from a contemporary engraving by Beauvarlet. Certainly, in type, the young model – blonde, gentle of expression, barely clothed and seated among the clouds – strongly resembles Boucher’s frequent depictions of the Graces (or Muses) in his mythological canvases from the later 1730s and early 1740s and throughout the rest of his career. Characteristic of Boucher’s style near the beginning of the 1740s, the painting evokes its model’s delicate beauty with the lightest, airiest and loosest of touch – the very manner that would profoundly influence Fragonard and a younger generation of French painters – and the thinnest layers of nearly translucent glazing. The near-life-size, bust-length scale and oval format of the painting is unusual for Boucher, and while it is possible that it was a sketch kept in the studio as a model for his large workshop, it seems equally likely that it represents a fragment salvaged from a larger, unfinished canvas intended to include depictions of several of the Graces or Muses reclining in the heavens. Regardless, its masterly paint handling, dazzling freedom of brushwork, and sparkling pastel palette display Boucher’s art at its most sensuous and pleasing.