La Boudeuse

A young man leans toward a young woman in a park, and she seems in no mood to listen. Watteau's small canvas, now called La Boudeuse, the sulking woman, travelled from London dealers to a British prime minister, a Russian count and finally the Hermitage.

The story behind the painting

La Boudeuse is the modern title of an oil on canvas painted by Antoine Watteau in the late 1710s; Wikidata gives the year 1718. After Watteau's death it was already in England, owned by the London dealer Salomon Gautier, and in his 1726 sale catalogue it seems to be lot 34, simply called a Man and a Woman sitting. Some time after 1736 it belonged to Sir Robert Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, and probably hung at 10 Downing Street or at Houghton Hall.

What to look for

The canvas is small, about 42 by 34 cm. A young couple sits in the foreground of a park, a rare example of a two figure landscape composition in Watteau's work. Over the years the picture has carried several names, and each one is a way of reading it: a man and a woman sitting in 1726, La Conversation in the nineteenth century, Scene champetre in a Russian inventory. Look at the two faces and the space between them, and decide for yourself which title fits best.

Meaning and intent

The painting is considered one of the best fetes galantes of Watteau's later years, scenes of elegant people at leisure in a park. In 1875 the writer Dmitry Grigorovich, a close friend of its Russian owner, called it a declaration of love in the garden. Yet its authenticity was debated by scholars, because it had been engraved by Philippe Mercier, a former follower of Watteau, and it was left out of Jean de Jullienne's edition of Watteau's work published in the 1730s.

Legacy

After Robert Walpole died in 1745, his son, the writer Horace Walpole, bought the picture back at the 1748 sale and hung it in the Tribune of Strawberry Hill House, where watercolours by John Carter and Edward Edwards show it. The Great Sale of 1842 sent it to London, then to the comte de Morny, half brother of the future Napoleon III, and to Paris dealers. In 1859 Count Pavel Stroganov acquired it for his Saint Petersburg mansion. After the 1917 Revolution it entered the Hermitage, where it remains.