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Your galleryFountain of Venus
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Compare the cool gray of Venus and the winged child with the warm, tanned skin of the tritons in the water, and decide which figures are meant to be stone.
In this large canvas Boucher painted some figures in gray, as if they were carved stone, and others as living beings, playing with the line between sculpture and painting. Its first purpose is not known: it may have been shown as a picture in its own right, but it was probably made as a design for a tapestry. The French aristocracy kept a taste for playful, sensual decoration like this through the whole of the 1700s.
oil on canvas · Framed: 246 x 228.5 x 6.5 cm · Cleveland Museum of Art · Rococo
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Fountain of Venus
- Artist
- François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
- Date
- 1756
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Dimensions
- Framed: 246 x 228.5 x 6.5 cm (96 7/8 x 89 15/16 x 2 9/16 in.); Unframed: 233 x 215 cm (91 3/4 x 84 5/8 in.)
- Credit line
- The Thomas L. Fawick Memorial Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.