Pastoral with a Bagpipe Player

With its pendant, P482, the painting represents some Boucher’s most ambitious works in the pastoral mode. Boucher continued the pastoral, utopian mode of Watteau's Fêtes galantes, anchoring them more clearly in an idealised, Italian setting. By exchanging Watteau's contemporary Parisians with idealised shepherds and shepherdesses, Boucher further removed the scenes from a recognizable contemporary reality, transposing them into an entirely imaginary world. While Watteau produced cabinet-sized pictures, Boucher often employed the pastoral for large-scale room decorations, as is the case here. The two pictures originally belonged to the Daniel-Charles Trudaine, who worked as governor of the Auvergne, before being put in charge of roads and bridges in France, a capacity in which he was responsible for extending and modernising the network considerably. From 1745 he instigated and supervised the production of a new street atlas of France. Trudaine hung the two paintings in the grand salon on the ground floor of his country house at Montigny–Lencoup near Fontainebleau. The scene was inspired by the theatrical characters of the immensely popular pantomimes of Boucher's friend, Charles-Simon Favart. At the Opéra Comique, where Boucher was both set designer and a keen member of the audience, Favart’s musical dramas combined the Arcadian idealism and aristocratic sensibilities of pastoral poetry with the rustic, sentimental characters of popular theatre. The painting depicts the cousins Lisette and Babette with the little shepherd who wins his sweetheart’s affection and a crown of flowers by serenading her on the bagpipes.