(Paris 1703–1770)
Noah entering the Ark,
oil on canvas, 50 x 61.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
sale, Versailles, 18 November 1962, no. 32;
European private collection

Literature:
A. Ananoff/D. Wildenstein, L’opera completa di Boucher, Milan 1980, no. 29;
A. Laing, François Boucher, exhibtion catalogue, New York/Detroit/Paris 1986, p. 121, under no. 10 (as a replica or copy).

We are grateful to Alastair Laing for confirming the present painting as an autograph work by Boucher on the basis of a high-resolution digital photograph. This revises the former attribution he made in 1986.

The present painting is related to Boucher’s version of the same theme that had long been considered lost before it was rediscovered in the 1980s (see Laing, 1986, no. 10, illustrated). This latter variant of Noah Entering the Ark and Noah’s Sacrifice once figured as a prominent pair in the Jullienne collection. The present painting is larger than the above version, with its format approximating a square.

It is probable that a patron had seen the above pendants in Boucher’s workshop and ordered a replica in a more classical format. Boucher consequently reduced the area of the sky and condensed both the building on the right-hand side and the ark on the left. According to Alastair Laing, the present picture is also less sketchily painted than the Jullienne painting.

It can be assumed that these paintings date from the period before Boucher left for Rome. Although at first sight an influence of Castiglione’s market scenes seems to reveal itself particularly in terms of subject matter, the present painting essentially differs from Castiglione’s works in the choice of the colours and the manner of painting. Therefore, Boucher presumably painted both the present composition and the two Jullienne paintings while he was still in France, where he drew his inspirations from engravings made after Castiglione’s paintings. The cockerel and the hens are based on preliminary studies for Boucher’s Fontaine in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm (see P. Bjurström, French Drawings. Eighteenth Century, Stockholm 1982, figs. 823 and 824). What is characteristic of Boucher is that in these paintings more space and significance has been assigned to the female figures than to the male ones.