Detail of The Dispatch of the Messenger by Boucher in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2010

Artist: François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)

Title: The Dispatch of the Messenger

Date: 1765

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: Oval, 12 5/8 x 10 1/2 in. (32.1 x 26.7 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Gift of Mrs. Joseph Heine, in memory of her husband, I. D. Levy, 1944

Accession Number: 44.141


Gallery Label:

At the Salon of 1765, this painting was exhibited as one of a series of four. Here the shepherd will fasten his love letter to the dove with a blue ribbon. A second oval depicted the arrival of the dove carrying the letter. In one of two rectangular canvases, the shepherdess read the letter to her confidante; in the other the lovers met.

The writer Denis Diderot, a harsh critic of Boucher, praised the paintings as "a charming little poem," but he condemned the falsity of the pastoral genre, comparing it to country life as represented in French opera. Drawings by Beauvarlet after the two ovals, made in preparation for engravings, were exhibited in the Salon of 1769.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/europe...