François Boucher

Almost certainly executed as an autonomous work of art in its own right, this fine sheet may be grouped with a number of drawings of the heads of young women that François Boucher produced throughout his career, but particularly in the 1750s and 1760s. These were not portraits as such, but rather intended as idealized types of feminine beauty. As the late Alastair Laing has noted of these head studies, ‘it is a branch of drawing that goes back to the exquisite studies of female heads and coiffure produced in the Renaissance by, above all, Florentine draftsmen; but in Boucher’s hands – and especially in a medium of red, black, and white chalks (“aux trois crayons”) – such studies of women’s heads gained a new immediacy. Sometimes these drawings are studies for, or are derived from, heads in paintings; very often, they are perfectly self-sufficient.’ A number of 18th century French collectors, such as Gabriel Huquier the Elder and Jean-Claude Gaspard de Sireuil, owned large numbers of such drawings of heads by Boucher.

As one scholar has noted, ‘Perhaps more than any other artist of his day, Boucher strove to create an ideal of feminine grace and charm, and if a tête de femme or tête de jeune fille was based on an actual model, it quickly became a generalized type in which all individual features were abandoned, and whose sole function was to please the eye of the beholder...They are not portraits, nor do they show any suggestion of sensuality; their only aim is to express a loveliness which is sometimes merely pretty, but at other times verges on the austere.’ Of such late drawings as the present sheet, the Boucher scholar Françoise Joulie has written that ‘Around 1765, François Boucher...drew women’s faces of a new elegance and serenity; more ‘noble’ than ‘coquettish’...they are easily recognisable by the width of their foreheads, their large eyes under perfectly arched eyebrows and their elegantly curled hair held in place by a ribbon. The mouth is larger, the face has lost its mischievous aspect and exudes a great deal of gentleness.’ Among comparable late drawings by Boucher is a Head of a Young Woman in a private collection.

We are grateful to Françoise Joulie for confirming the attrribution of the present sheet.