Pastorale: A Peasant Boy Fishing

Boucher was a young man at the start of an illustrious career when he painted this pastoral. His style of painting—decorative and charming, was at the same time robust, sensual, and full of energy. This type of romanticized vision of country life, in which a couple full of the bloom of youth relax and flirt in an idealized landscape, was extremely popular among the French aristocracy and was celebrated in poetry and theater as well as the visual arts.