Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
François Boucher
French; 18th-century
Ottawa, Canada: National Gallery of Canada
56%
The Cherished Abode. c1742. Oil on canvas
Within the history of trompe-l'oeil paintings that represent paintings (which includes Brueghel's collaborations with Rubens as well as the paintings of Gijsbrechts and Dou and even, though perhaps contentiously, a work like Raphael's Sistine Madonna) Boucher's cadre feint confections like The Cherished Abode are highly developed in both conceptual and painterly terms. Here, the fake frame is complex not only as a piece of painting but also in its tonal and structural relationship with the scene it contains; the cherub swinging from the fronds of the frame is a cheeky device that reminds us of the fiction of everything we see. But is this sufficient for good art? Or to put it another way, ought an 18th-century painting attempt to succeed aesthetically as more (or other) than just a painting? The problem is that a good painting, by dint of being good rather than by means of devices, leads you through the fact of its falsehood but then reaffirms itself as a truth. The higher-order hang-ups with deception and illusion in an artwork like this bring you to the threshold of quality but refuse to walk through it. (TFS, 2025)