Pastries, Talmouses, All Hot (c. 1737): Art, History and Details

Pastries, Talmouses, All Hot (c. 1737) 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:

François Boucher made the drawing as a print design for a series depicting Parisian tradespeople, titled the Cris de Paris (Criers of Paris), which consisted of 12 plates. Subjects in the series included this vendor of hot pastries and cheese puffs as well as a variety of other vendors such as a knife grinder, broom seller, chimney sweep, and vegetable seller. Boucher was known primarily for images epitomizing the elegant court life of France—nudes, decorative compositions, and pastorals—rather than so-called “low life” subjects such as street vendors. Boucher’s series struck a chord with the growing middle-class print-buying public in France, with its designs migrating to a variety of decorative arts and porcelain figurines.

Object facts

• Title: Pastries, Talmouses, All Hot
• Date: c. 1737
• Creator attribution: François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black and red chalks on paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 25.1 x 16.8 cm (9 7/8 x 6 5/8 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2025.140

A detail from the museum

Despite its subject of a street vendor, Boucher’s composition retains some of the courtly artificiality of his age, with an elegantly dressed young gentleman and unkempt baker’s apprentice whose pose is nonetheless balletic, like a dancer at a courtly fête.

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

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.