Head of Flora

This engraving, after François Boucher's pastel Head of Flora, attests to the prominent position Boucher held in court art circles in the later 1760s. When Louis-Marin Bonnet secretly devised a multiple plate method to imitate pastel paintings as prints, he chose to reproduce Boucher's pastel for his most ambitious and complex engraving, printed from eight plates. Never before and never afterward did a French eighteenth-century printmaker succeed in making a color print using so many plates. This particular impression belonged to Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870) de Goncourt, the two brothers jointly credited with the revival of interest in the art and culture of pre-Revolutionary France during the late nineteenth century.