Music and Dance (1740s): Art, History and Details

Music and Dance (1740s) 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:

Along with Cupids in Conspiracy (1948.181.2), this work is surely part of a series of over-door paintings that would have been installed in a house. However, where the panels were originally installed or who commissioned them remains unknown. They exemplify the fusion of fine arts and decorative arts that was common in elite interior design in 18th-century France. Even though the paintings were part of the wall decoration of the room, the patrons chose François Boucher, a well-known painter of portraits and genre scenes, as well as mythological and religious subjects, to execute them. These two paintings reflect a style that was popular both at court and among other wealthy patrons through much of the eighteenth century: light, charming, pastoral scenes that mix classical elements with pure fantasy. Both of them feature putti, chubby baby characters that add a touch of humor to the images.

Object facts

• Title: Music and Dance
• Date: 1740s
• Creator attribution: François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 77.5 x 131.5 x 6 cm (30 1/2 x 51 3/4 x 2 3/8 in.); Unframed: 69 x 123 cm (27 3/16 x 48 7/16 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1948.181.1

Collection credit

Gift of the Louis Dudley Beaumont Foundation

Further reading listed by the museum

• Hunter-Stiebel, Penelope, Philippe Le Leyzour, Olivier Baumont, Noémi Rime, Vincent Lievre-Picard, Olivier Baumont, François Bazola, Destouches, and Philibert Cardonne. La Volupté Du Goût: French Painting in the Age of Madame De Pompadour. Paris: Somogy, 2008.
• Detroit Institute of Arts. The Fourth Loan Exhibition of Old Masters: French Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, Detroit Institute of Arts, December 2 to 20, 1926. [Detroit]: [Institute of Arts], 1926.
• Cleveland Museum of Art. Catalogue of Paintings. Pt. 3. European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1974.

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.