Les Forges de Vulcain

Clouds, cupids and roses fill a forge: Venus has come to collect the weapons her husband made for her son. Boucher painted it as a design for a royal tapestry.

The story behind the painting

Boucher painted this canvas in 1757, after his appointment in 1755 as inspector at the Gobelins Manufactory, the royal tapestry workshop. In May 1757 King Louis XV approved a set of four tapestries, The Loves of the Gods, each designed by a different artist: Charles-Andre van Loo, Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre and Joseph-Marie Vien. The full-scale designs were shown at the Salon that summer, though Boucher's submission was delayed despite his early start, and the paintings then went to Gobelins for weaving.

What to look for

The scene comes from Book VIII of the Aeneid. Homely but muscular Vulcan sits on the ground at the right, offering the celestial Venus the weapons he has forged for her son Aeneas: look for the helmet, the sword and the quiver. The Aeneid does not describe this moment in detail, so Boucher added Cupid scattering roses, the Hours and the Graces. A rose-crowned nymph sits in Venus's lap, and her touch on Cupid's dart stands for the power of love Venus used on her husband. The canvas is about 320 cm square.

Meaning and intent

Venus at Vulcan's forge returned again and again in Boucher's career because it let him surround a woman's figure with cupids, set against masculine forms and myth. The title most used today, Venus Requesting Arms for Aeneas, is misleading: she is not asking for the arms but arriving to take them, after having seduced her husband into making them. Boucher believed ideal feminine beauty needed a delicate, round form, and once claimed that of all his models only his gilder's wife had it.

Legacy

Boucher's tapestry sold fewer versions at Gobelins than those designed by Vien and Pierre; some suggest his composition lacked a unified design. Yet Marigny, the Minister of the Arts, liked it enough to keep the coloured sketches for himself, unusual since Boucher normally kept his own. When Boucher later advised his pupil Mannlich to paint the same subject and placed Venus on clouds, the patron disliked it, a sign of changing taste. The painting is now in the Louvre.