Like its companion painting Evening, or Le sommeil interrompu, this canvas originally formed part of the group of four large pictures formerly owned by Emily Ridgway and the de Ganay family in Paris, and later acquired by the celebrated collects or Sir Joseph Robinson in London. Here a winged figure of ‘Amour’ leads two young girls through a wooded landscape towards a statue of Cupid. The particular subject of L’Offrande à l’Amour or The Offering to Love, in which a young girl or one or more young women make offerings before a statue of the god of Love, became highly popular in French painting in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Like Evening, the Offering to Love must have come from Beauvais and was therefore presumably intended as a tapestry cartoon. Unlike its companion, however, it cannot be associated with the Fountain of Love or any of the sets from the Noble Pastorale. Although in his transcription of the document recording expenditure on Beauvais tapestry models in 1754 Badin lists six paintings by Boucher for the Noble Pastorale,1 all bar one of the fourteen editions woven by Beauvais were of only five subjects each. The exception was the lost Shepherdess woven in 1769–71 as a supplement for a set destined for the mesdames, the unmarried daughters of Louis XV, whose subject does not fit with that of the present painting.2 By 1793, as Badin records, only ‘5 tableaux Pastorales de Boucher’ are listed among the State property at Beauvais following the retirement of its director de Menou that year.3 The subject of the present canvas cannot be linked to any other known surviving tapestry project undertaken by Boucher for the Beauvais manufacture. As Charissa Bremer-David has kindly pointed out, there is no record in the pay registers for the weavers at Beauvais for a subject corresponding to the Offering to Love, nor of any corresponding scene among the band descriptions for the Noble Pastorale series. Furthermore, as Rosenberg and Stewart noted, it cannot be associated with any existing painting, drawing or study by Boucher, and it may therefore record a project or tapestry cartoon that is now lost or was never completed.
Right: Fig 2. The current lot showing the joins and additions to the canvas
The relationship of the present painting with the other three canvases formerly in the Robinson collects ion beyond their history together is therefore very difficult to determine. As the present canvas shares all the same details of framing and relining, including the shaped écoinçons from its original wall mounting cut from each corner (fig. 1), the Offering to Love has clearly formed part of the same decorative cycle as its companions from the outset. The construction of the canvas from fragments of many differing sizes around a central core (fig. 2) is very similar to that of Evening, and the two were seemingly matched as a pair. The figures of the two girls are clearly entirely dependent upon Boucher’s prototypes, but as the design cannot be linked to any of the Pastorale tapestries, it is possible that The Offering to Love originally belonged to a different, unrealised, project and was co-opted in order to complete the set of four, perhaps at Beauvais or else at the request of the buyer of the bandes at the 1829 sale. Ananoff and Rosenberg, who may have known the ex-Robinson pictures only from photographs, remarked upon the purely decorative idiom of this and Evening, and doubted their connection to Boucher himself.4 Alastair Laing, however, following first-hand inspection of the canvas, believes that, like Evening, the heads of the two principal figures are of sufficient quality to be from the hand of Boucher himself, with the remainder painted by the studio, and the additions added at a later date, presumably in the nineteenth century.5 In his view, however, the presence of the classical ‘Amour’ next to the two girls would undermine the possibility that the ex-Robinson canvas could originally have formed a fitting sixth tableau of the Noble Pastorale, whose figures are entirely pastoral. As with its companions, it seems most likely that core of the Offering to Love was also used as a cartoon or model at Beauvais, presumably for an unrealised commission, and was later expanded, probably prior to the sale of the cartoon fragments in 1829 and certainly by 1846, in order to complete the set with Evening, Le Billet Doux in Taiwan, and the Vertumnus and Pomona in San Francisco.
1 Badin 1909, p. 37: ‘La Noble Pastorale, en six tableaux de 22 aunes de cours, de Boucher…’.
2 The actual appearance of this lost painting remains unknown. E. Standen, ‘Boucher as a tapestry designer’, in François Boucher 1703–1770, exh. cat., New York–Detroit–Paris 1986–87, p. 328, speculated that this last figure may have been that of La Bohémienne re-used from Boucher’s earlier Beauvais series the Fêtes Italiennes. See also Bremer-David 2008, pp. 313 and 315 n. 7.
3 Badin 1909, pp. 90–91: ‘Cinq tableaux Pastorales de Boucher’.
4 Ananoff and Wildenstein 1976, II, pp. 18–19, under no. 321. Hubert Marquis de Ganay, in a letter of 2 January 1968, recorded an old suggestion that Boucher’s follower Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745–1811) was thought to have painted one of the set of four canvases. See Rosenberg and Stewart 1987, p. 125, n. 4. We are grateful to Elise Effmann Clifford at the Replica Handbags s Museum of San Francisco for the full text of this reference.
5 This observation has recently been confirmed in condition reports prepared by Henry Gentle which accompany this lot and lot 25.