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Are They Thinking about the Grape? (Pensent-ils au raisin?)
François Boucher·1747
Historical Context
Are They Thinking About the Grape? (1747), at the Art Institute of Chicago, is one of Boucher's pastoral paintings that combine rustic genre with subtle erotic suggestion. The title's playful question implies that the young couple are thinking about something other than the grapes in their basket — a typical Rococo verbal-visual pun. Boucher's pastoral subjects presented an idealized countryside populated by beautiful young people in spotless clothing, a fantasy of rural life that satisfied the aristocratic appetite for pastoral escapism. The painting demonstrates Boucher's mastery of the decorative aesthetic that made him the most influential French painter of the mid-eighteenth century and First Painter to the King under Louis XV.
Technical Analysis
Boucher's palette of soft pinks, blues, and greens creates the characteristic Rococo atmosphere of decorative elegance. The figures are modeled with smooth, idealized flesh tones, and the landscape is treated as a decorative backdrop rather than a naturalistic setting.
Provenance
With the pendant Flageolet Player, probably Jean Baptiste Machault d’Arnouville (died 1794), contrôleur général des finances; by descent to Melchior, marquis de Vogüe, one of whose descendants married comte René de Rohan Chabot [proposed by Alistair Laing in connection with the history of the pendant, in a letter to Susan Wise, August 13, 1986 in curatorial file]. Comte René de Rohan Chabot, Paris; sold to Wildenstein, 1959 [telephone conversation of Ay-Wang Hsia with Susan Wise, May 4, 1982]; sold to the Art Institute, 1973.
