# The Forest [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [BOUCHER, François]() - Date: 1701-1750 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 131 x 163 cm ## Commentary Boucher's pastorals and landscape paintings, which are certainly part of his rococo achievement, are willfully artificial on a basis of real observation. They create a new branch of rococo art in which the growing tendency to shake off dynastic and mythological duties has been completely developed; they are stage settings without characters, or with at most some actor-peasants, in which nature is dressed alluringly as Venus had been undressed. Perhaps Boucher's most enchanted landscapes are those where the stage is set but the characters hardly appear: a rural dream of tranquil nature where man has added only picturesque water wheels, some cottages and a few inevitable doves, and where the taffeta grass, the blue trees, and the pale stretched silk sky create an ingenious, impossible Arcadia more beautiful than any reality. By the mid-1750s Gainsborough in England was achieving similar effects, blending French elegance with native facts and producing idyllic landscapes, often with courting woodcutters and milkmaids. ## Related artworks - [A Summer Pastoral]() - [Adoration of the Shepherds]() - [Allegory of Music]() - [Allegory of Music]() - [Allegory of Painting]() - [Allegory of Poetry]() - [An Autumn Pastoral \(detail\)]() - [An Autumn Pastoral]() - [Apollo Revealing his Divinity before the Shepherdess Isse]() - [Are They Thinking About the Grape?]() - [Blond Odalisque \(L'Odalisque Blonde\)]() - [Brown Odalisque \(L'Odalisque Brune\)]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()