BOUCHER and FRAGONARD

At the king’s court

From Palazzo Barberini to Casa Museo Zani

from 14 February to 25 May 2025

“An exhibition that enchants with the elegance, lightness and preciousness of the works painted by two of the most legendary French painters of the eighteenth century”

The painters who seduced the French court of Louis For the first time, the works of François Boucher (Paris 1703-1770) and the small pictorial jewel of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (Grasse 1732-Paris 1806) from the Roman collections are thus combined with two authentic masterpieces by François Boucher from the Zani collection.

At the court of France, Louis XV appointed François Boucher as the king’s first painter in 1765, effectively crowning a career that was nothing short of legendary. Boucher’s fame has been continuously expanding since 1731, the year of his return to Paris after his stay in Rome (in 1723 he won the Prix de Rome) and the year in which he was welcomed as a painter of historical subjects at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. His privileged relationship with Madame de Pompadour, favorite of the King of France, together with the friendship of the Marquis of Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, allowed him to become one of the painters of the royal court in 1742 and, in 1761, rector of the Académie itself.

One of the most legendary painters of the French school, Boucher owes much to Italian painting, especially to Veronese, Guercino and Tiepolo who, admired and studied during his Italian stay, contributed to defining the unmistakable, vaporous and luminous chromatic palette of his works.

Casa Museo Zani preserves, among others, two paintings by Boucher. The first, signed and dated 1741, boasts a collecting history that takes us back to the court of Louis XV, being originally part of the artistic heritage of the royal castle of Choisy. The oval canvas, inserted in a spectacular frame, depicts two sleeping cupids in the foreground and a third at the top with a tangle of vine shoots, alluding to one of the four elements, The Earth, originally part of a group of four pendants that represented the natural elements (water, air, earth and fire).

The canvases were commissioned from Boucher to decorate the interior of the Château de Choisy which Louis XV had acquired in 1739 and where they remained until 1792 when they were transferred to Paris.

The second Zani canvas with Venus in the forge of Vulcan is certainly the most spectacular and impressive painting by Boucher today preserved in an Italian collection, whose history takes us once again to the court of King Louis XV.

The work is closely connected to another painting by Boucher, now kept in the Musée du Louvre, originally in the royal castle of Marly and intended for the sovereign’s bedroom, signed and dated 1747. According to the most recent studies, the Zani example, given the numerous repentances revealed by scientific investigations, it could even be prior to the Louvre canvas, which remained unfinished and preserved in the artist’s atelier. Among the changes in ownership of the work before it entered the Casa Zani, after the 18th century, we note those in the collection of the French painter Jean-Louis David (1792-1868) and in that of the Billardet family who placed it in the castle of Pesmes in Haute-Saône. In 1913, the painting was already owned by Wildenstein, exhibited in the New York gallery, while, after 1976, it arrived in France and, in 2013, became part of the Zani collection. Today the Brescian Bouchers meet those of Palazzo Barberini, works donated to the Italian State in 1962 by Dimitri Sursock, Duke of Cervinara. The paintings celebrate the great French painter not only as a brilliant figure painter but also as an excellent landscape painter, with a particular propensity for rendering the harmony between figures and surrounding nature, according to the dictates of the myth of Arcadia, highly appreciated by artists in mid-19th century in France.

In fact, next to the sublime canvas depicting The Little Gardener (1767), a compositional enchantment between the pearly complexion of the face, the vaporous silk dress (an extraordinary robe à la française) and the poetic still life with a basket of roses, there are two extraordinary landscape subjects: The Morning (1764) and The Evening (1764), in which highly detailed characters dressed in popular styles are intent on carrying out daily tasks and blend into the lenticular details of nature that dominates the surrounding landscape, immortalized by Boucher with the light of morning and dusk.

In the exhibition you can also admire a true jewel of the pictorial production of Jean Honoré Fragonard (Grasse 1732 – Paris 1806), who trained under the guidance of François Boucher who, after appreciating his artistic skills, went so far as to commission him to make some copies of his paintings requested by clients. In Rome, where he stayed for six years, winning the Prix de Rome in 1753, Fragonard was enchanted by the large and small gardens that dominated the urban scene and, from that moment on, he transferred them in different forms within his own pictorial works. Allegorical painting and the figure in the landscape thus became the artist’s most frequented genres, thanks to which he reached absolute compositional heights as well as great fortune, also confirmed by the numerous works for the French court. The great recognition, before the oblivion that marked the end of his existence, was achieved precisely with a genre of “light” painting, with mischievous references, in perfect rococo style, particularly appreciated even at the court of Louis XVI.

Annette at twenty years old (ca. 1762) displayed in the exhibition falls perfectly into this pictorial genre, delicate, poetic, constructed with masterly chiaroscuro effects, with the subject taken from one of the Moral Tales of Jean-François Marmontel, a well-known Enlightenment collaborator of the Encyclopédie. In a large landscape with a bucolic character, Fragonard places the two small backlit figures of Annette and Lubin, two Belgian cousins ​​in love. Orphans from the age of eight, the two will grow up in a hut raising sheep, until their love is thwarted because it is considered incestuous, after the birth of a son.

The exhibition can be visited upon reservation: 0302520479 – info@fondazionezani.com