Fountain of Venus (1756): Art, History and Details

Fountain of Venus (1756) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is François Boucher (French, 1703–1770).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Lighthearted, erotic decorative schemes remained popular among the French aristocracy throughout the 1700s. In this painting, part of the playfulness comes from the way Boucher painted some of the figures in gray, as if made of stone, while the others are fully human. The artist toyed with the boundaries of painting and sculpture, as well as fiction and reality.The original purpose of this painting remains unclear. While it may have been exhibited as an independent work of art, it probably served initially as a preliminary design for a tapestry.

Object facts

• Title: Fountain of Venus
• Date: 1756
• Creator attribution: François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 246 x 228.5 x 6.5 cm (96 7/8 x 89 15/16 x 2 9/16 in.); Unframed: 233 x 215 cm (91 3/4 x 84 5/8 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1979.55

Collection credit

The Thomas L. Fawick Memorial Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume.
• Deutsches Historisches Museum, Datenbank "Sammlung des Sonderauftrages Linz.”
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.