François Boucher by Alexandre Ananoff; Daniel WildensteinReview by: Donald PosnerThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 560-562Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049829 .

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560 THE ART BULLETIN

equal in value. Also lost in reproduction are the sparkling accents, many of them achieved by fine flicks of moistened chalk.

Other details not visible in photographs are worth men- tioning. It is a pity that so many of the 95 drawings were laid down, for in at least one case an inscription on the back is faintly visible but illegible (No. 12). In preparing the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine (No. 63) for exhibition, the British Museum detached it from its backing, revealing on the verso a red and black chalk study of heads of infants that was not reproduced in the catalogue or displayed in the exhibition. That this sketch does not appear to be Murillo's is cause for scant concern, for at least two other drawings by Murillo have unrelated sketches on the back (Nos. 9, 35). Occasion- ally the delicacy of Murillo's washes is obscured by white highlighting that has oxidized (e.g., No. 61), reversing the tonal values. These images have been wisely printed light, successfully minimizing the disfiguring blotches.

Of the 95 drawings in the catalogue, 17 were introduced to the literature by Angulo and 23 by Brown; the list of rejected attributions contains two more drawings discovered by An- gulo (although one of these was more a suggestion than an attribution). Because the two men are working simultane- ously on the same problems, a comparison of their work seems inevitable. Brown's catalogue is, of course, longer than any of Angulo's articles, and hence his approach is more comprehensive. Angulo focuses his queries upon problems of chronology and authenticity. Chronology is de- scribed in general terms, but on the whole his chronology stands up well when reconsidered by other scholars. Brown provides more specific dates and more exact placement of undated drawings. On questions of style and attribution the two authors exhibit different approaches. Compared with Brown's attributions, Angulo's selection of drawings provides a more consistent picture of style. One gathers from Brown's choices that he finds this uniform view too confining, but it is disappointing that he does not explain his viewpoint. One of the goals of a catalogue raisonne should be to raise and answer the question: who is Murillo the draftsman? The drawings chosen by Brown show Murillo as an artist capable of wide variations of style, but the text frequently points out only similarities between the draw- ings.

In the catalogue Brown publishes as Murillo's the Christ Child as the Good Shepherd at Hamburg (No. 26), but he now agrees that a recently sold version is superior in quality.3 In part the catalogue error may stem from the attitude that informs Brown's section, "Copies, Imitations, Fakes and Works by Followers." Speaking of copies, he says that "the quality may vary from drawing to drawing, but it is never very great" (p. 38). Because Murillo was considered for 200 years the peer of Raphael, it is safer to assume that Murillo's drawings were copied by the gifted as well as the subser- vient. Although the Hamburg copy is perhaps not Murillo's, its delicate modulations of tone attest to a remarkable talent on the part of its unknown creator.

Inevitably, new drawings will appear and will modify in- formation gathered in 1975, but, because it assembles for the

first time all of Murillo's known drawings and oil sketches, Brown's catalogue will serve as a point of departure for some time. Its author merits recognition also for another reason. For at least the last quarter-century it has been observed that Murillo's works deserve reevaluation, because the last comprehensive monograph on him was Curtis's Veldzquez and Murillo in 1883. Rigorous reevaluation began with the work of Angulo in the late 1950's. For the last 20 years the latter has gathered material for what promises to be the authoritative compilation of Murillo's oeuvre. As former director of the Prado and head of the Instituto Diego VelAzquez he has had access to abundant material, and he is said to have knowl- edge of unpublished paintings, drawings, and documents. The awaited appearance of Angulo's monograph has gener- ally inhibited research on Murillo. It is probably true that in the last decade more doctoral dissertations have not been written on Murillo than on any other major Spanish Baroque artist, and, with the exception of this catalogue, no serious general study of Murillo's work has appeared. Brown's re- search on Murillo's drawings, paintings, and critical for- tunes is, of course, important per se. Perhaps more signifi- cant is the fact that his book, different from Angulo's, has revived the process of scholarly dialogue so essential to the vital and valid definition of an artist.

GRIDLEY MCKIM SMITH

Tulane University

SChristie's, London, July 6, 1977, lot 102. See also E Russell, "Two Murillo Drawings and the St. Helens Collection," Burlington Magazine, cxix, 1977, 601. I am grateful to Eric Young for pointing out the Christie's drawings to me while I was in London.

ALEXANDRE ANANOFF, with the collaboration of DANIEL WIL- DENSTEIN, Francois Boucher, 2 vols., Lausanne-Paris, La Bibliotheque des Arts, 1976. Pp. viii + 782; 1,798 figs., 16 color pls. $190

In the half-century following the Goncourt brothers' publi- cation of their appreciative study of Boucher in 1861 a very considerable body of significant scholarship on the artist was produced: Paul Mantz's book of 1880; Andre Michel's still standard biography in 1886, and the oeuvre catalogue prepared by Souillie and Masson for the 1906 edition of Michel's work; Pierre de Nolhac's book with catalogue by Georges Pannier in 1907; and, for the English-reading pub- lic, Haldane MacFall's monograph of 1908. These studies are impressive, to some extent marvelously so. Still, given the limited use of photographic reproduction at the time and the relatively small part of the master's large and varied output then known, 19th-century scholarship could not succeed in making Boucher's art genuinely accessible for study and critical appreciation. Since then there has been no grand- scale publication on Boucher. His work has continued to seem a vast, confusing terrain dotted by a not very great number of well-studied pictures in major collections and crossed by a few imperfectly seen and partially presumed lines of historical connections.

One cannot say that Alexandre Ananoff, in the book under review, has dispelled long-standing confusion. In- deed, in some ways he can be accused of having added to it. But one must say that he has established new terms for scholarly confrontation with Boucher; and this is an achievement of such magnitude in the present state of re- search that it compensates in fairly large measure for the defects of his book.

Ananoff has produced a catalogue of 690 paintings. It fills 572 pages and is illustrated by an astounding 1,611 figures which show not only the paintings and details of them, but

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BOOK REVIEWS 561

also drawings, prints, tapestries, and even sculptures as- sociated with them. Preceding the catalogue is a 148-page chronological table citing facts and quoting often hard-to- find literature, letters, and documents from 1703 to 1798 which concern Boucher and his art. (Another eight pages add not always significant material from 1802 to 1974.) Addi- tional figures appear in this section. They are particularly useful in documenting Boucher's activity as a printmaker and book illustrator. Following the catalogue are 14 two- column pages containing a list of now unknown works that were mentioned in 18th-century sales catalogues or inven- tories as painted by Boucher, some of them in collaboration with other artists. A bibliography and indexes complete the book.

This extraordinary tool for Boucher research has been very handsomely produced. One is grateful for the high quality as well as the abundance of the book's illustrations, and also for the lavish format and layout, which greatly facilitate its use. Unfortunately, it is an imperfect tool. I do not criticize it for the almost total lack of interest it displays in iconography, or in historical relationships between Boucher and his contemporaries. Ananoff's interest is al- most exclusively in connoisseurship, which is certainly sub- ject enough for a book on Boucher today. Considered as a tool for connoisseurship, however, it gives great cause for complaint. There are two problems, one of them a matter of attitude, the other of workmanship.

Ananoff claims to have collected all Boucher's known au- thentic paintings and to have arranged them in proper chronological order. Why should we accept his conclusions? There is not even a brief introductory text to explain the principles that guided his work or the grounds for his deci- sions. Neither do the catalogue entries enlighten us, for they almost never include comments about such matters. Ananoff takes the position that expertise (and he has published ex- tensively on French 18th-century art) need not, or perhaps cannot, explain its conclusions. Indeed, he has anticipated a certain degree of disbelief about some of his attributions: he writes, in the two-page foreword, that Boucher "eut plusieurs mani'res, ... tellement differentes qu'il n'est

guere facile pour un non-initie d'admettre que c'est la meme personne qui a pr4side

" l'ex&cution." He does not believe,

however, that initiation into the mysteries of Boucher con- noisseurship can be accomplished by mere study of stylistic and other evidence. What has enabled him truly to under- stand Boucher, he says, are "les heures que nous passames

a. Paris . . . en respirant son air, en essayant de voir A travers ses yeux les memes objets, en nous 6vertuant placer nos pas dans les siens, . . . en vivant sous le m~me ciel si particulier de l'Ile-de-France" (I, vii-viii). Clearly, one can disagree with him about Boucher (and the inclusion and dating of a lot of the works catalogued in this book are in some degree debatable, as is the exclusion of some others), but one cannot very profitably argue with him.

Of course, the opinions of a man who has looked long and attentively at Boucher's works should be valuable, even if it is not his style to explain them. One loses confidence, how- ever, in Ananoff's opinions and questions the degree of care that went into their making as one becomes aware of the book's general unreliability in matters of scholarly and or- ganizational detail. I am sorry to report that I have not once used the book without discovering some error, omission, or plain failure to present the facts clearly. The following exam- ples may suggest what it is like to use it as a research tool.

I have been interested in portraits of Mme. de Pompadour.

The index to Ananoff's catalogue of paintings, under "Por- traits," lists two in Volume I which are in fact in Volume II. It omits the famous Victoria and Albert Museum portrait and the Fogg Art Museum portrait, but I found them anyway. I did not find at all the portrait in the Louvre showing Pom- padour standing. A variant of this picture, from the James de Rothschild Collection, is catalogued as No. 520 (it is also not indexed under "Portraits of Pompadour"), but even here no reference is made to the Louvre painting. What makes the latter especially interesting is the fact that it and the Rothschild picture, both quite small, show Pompadour in the same room (one that suggests the setting of the great Munich portrait of 1756) and in the same pose, but in differ- ent costumes and surrounded by different furnishings. The two pictures might be explained as sketches made to present variant proposals to the Marquise for a large-scale portrait. The Louvre picture appears in Briere's catalogue of the museum's French paintings as merely attributed to Boucher (1924, 14), but the catalogue of 1972 makes no such qualifica- tion (p. 42), and it has recently been accepted by Prince von Hohenzollern in an article on the Munich picture (Pantheon, Iv, 1972, 302, 308). Perhaps Ananoff rejects the attribution. If so, one still should have found it mentioned in No. 520 under "Analogies" or "Copies," categories that serve Ananoff in other instances. It is not reassuring to discover that the author overlooks a possibly authentic and certainly relevant work, in the Louvre of all places. It is also disturb- ing that the provenance given the Rothschild picture when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1954-55 (Lord Clif- den sale, 1895) is not reported in No. 520.

One of my students has been investigating The Vegetable Vendor in the Chrysler Collection (Ananoff, No. 83). Regina Slatkin has proposed a date of about 1738 for it, based on the apparent connection between it and a pastel inscribed "f. Boucher 1738" (Francois Boucher in North American Collections. 100 Drawings, Washington and Chicago, 1973-74, No. 32, and supplement to the catalogue). Ananoff, who dates the paint- ing 1732, seems to reject the attribution of the pastel, which is surprising because it has a distinguished 18th-century provenance. He also claims that the inscription is apocry- phal. He gives no reasons for his views about the pastel or the date of the painting. This is to be expected; what is not is his assertion that this early work and its pendant (No. 82; Frick Art Museum, Pittsburgh) made two of a suite of four pictures, the others being the paintings of 1768 in the Met- ropolitan Museum of Art (Nos. 654 and 655). It turns out that Nos. 82 and 83 have been confused with Nos. 682 and 683, the provenance of which has also been given to the earlier works. The error is egregious and it certainly ought to have been caught in galley or page proofs or later. It is not noted on the page of "Corrigenda" at the end of Volume II.

Four entries, Nos. 313-16, are a maddening labyrinth of anomalies and incomplete information. I call attention to them because they concern two important early works by Fragonard, although one would not know it from Ananoff's discussion. In a recently discovered sketch by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, probably made in 1777, four pictures appear with the comment that they are ". .. par mr boucher psseu et mr fragonard bleve qui ne les aime point. R~my [a dealer and expert] dit que l'invention est de deshays 46 p. 70 p." Ananoff ignores the reference to Deshays. Two of the pic- tures correspond exactly, in composition and details, to Fragonard's See-Saw in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and Blind Man's Buff in the Toledo museum. Ananoff doesn't impart this information; he says only, under the rubric

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562 THE ART BULLETIN

"Analogies," that "un theme similaire" was engraved by Beauvarlet after Fragonard. He does refer to Wildenstein's monograph of 1960 on Fragonard where, of course, one dis- covers the latter's paintings. They are smaller than the works recorded by Saint-Aubin and one of them, Blind Man's Buff, is painted in the reverse direction from Saint-Aubin's sketch, which would seem significant in an attempt to establish the facts about the original paintings and their descendants. Turning back to Ananoff, one finds that it is virtually im- possible to understand from his presentation the precise compositional or directional relationships to the several paintings at issue of the prints he lists and illustrates (one of the illustrated prints, 314/4, doesn't correspond to any of the prints he lists). Just how the known paintings by Fragonard relate to what seems to have been a group of four works made by him in collaboration with Boucher is a problem that must await further study. It will not be helped by Ananoff, who proposes that two pictures, attributed to Boucher and sold at Christie's in 1974 (rather sorry-looking works as they appear in the illustrations), are survivors of that group of four paintings.

I could go on. I will add only that another researcher has actually discovered Ananoff cataloguing the same work, now in the Louvre, twice over, giving it a different size, provenance, and bibliography each time (Burlington Magazine, cxix, 1977, 833, n. 18). One is constrained to ex- press one's frustration and irritation with this book. It is an undependable vehicle, constantly in need of righting; still, it carries us farther into the vast terrain of Boucher's art, and for that we must be grateful.

DONALD POSNER

New York University, Institute of Fine Arts

JOHN DIXON HUNT and PETER WILLIS, eds., The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, New York, Harper & Row, 1975, Pp. 390; 100 ills. $25

JOHN DIXON HUNT, The Figure in the Landscape, Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Pp. 271; 75 ills. $16 These two volumes deserve to be read together as com- plementary studies of landscape themes in English litera- ture, painting, and gardening. The Genius of the Place pro- vides an anthology and survey of literary texts and visual documents relating to English gardens from 1620 to 1820. The Figure in the Landscape, although covering essentially the same period, is at once more focused, concentrating as it does on the 18th century, and more ambitious, seeking to trace and untangle the complex web of relationships uniting the three sister arts of poetry, painting, and gardening. The Genius of the Place will undoubtedly prove of greater use to art historians because it provides, at long last, a well-organized compendium of carefully edited source material bearing on English landscape gardens. Because of its aims and critical function, The Figure in the Landscape will prove particularly stimulating to readers already familiar with English land- scape poetry. Hunt here opens up new interpretive vistas, linking specific landscape themes in 18th-century poetry and gardens and shedding new light on changing attitudes toward the artistic experience and structuring of the natural environment.

The organization of Hunt and Willis's volume is logical and clear, proceeding generally in chronological order, but

remaining flexible enough to follow important themes and issues in gardening. The editors have chosen widely from poems, letters, gardening treatises, and novels, and a good measure of their success is the breadth of vision and variety of viewpoints represented here. Preceding each set of selec- tions (arranged by author) is a brief preface that serves to place the extracts in their proper literary and art-historical context. The illustrations, well chosen and for the most part clearly printed, form a rich body of visual sources closely tied both to the literary texts and the critical apparatus. The result is a volume that provides a general introduction to the field and as such functions admirably as a textbook, while at the same time offering a wealth of sensitive critical insights that will stimulate further inquiry.

The first section deals with the formal, emblematic gar- dens of the 17th century, extending through the reign of Queen Anne. One of the key texts considered here is Mar- veil's Upon Appleton House, the garden images of which the editors rightly view as drawn predominantly from the sym- bols of the medieval hortus conclusus, but which are com- bined with an appreciation of more natural woodland pros- pects. In their commentary the editors perhaps under- estimate the significance of classical sources for the genre of the country-house poem, which, as they point out, can be traced back through Jonson's To Penshurst all the way to Horace. It is a pity the chronological limits of their survey could not have been expanded to include Jonson's remark- able poem, for, like Upon Appleton House, it anticipates the next age and serves as a standard for measuring the Augus- tan achievement in literature and in the culture of country houses. Both ages are illuminated, as they are evaluated, by the analogy with Augustan Rome and its culture.

The next group of texts and images treats early ex- pressions of the new style of English landscape gardening and reviews the crucial contributions of Addison, Switzer, and Pope, among numerous others. The editors' choice of texts serves to correct the impression that Pope's pro- nouncements on gardening were as radical as some critics have suggested, and further illustrates the poet's awareness of classical precedent on the one hand and his willingness to break with it on the other. (The Augustans themselves, it has been said perhaps too often, were not always Augustan.) Pope, in his essay on gardens, cites Virgil and Homer as masters of "painting" in poetry, but he also quotes II Pen- seroso. In a different vein, Pope can poke marvelous fun at topiary designs, for which Pliny provided the classical mod- els, describing certain excessively artful examples in the form of a mock catalogue:

ADAM and Eve in Yew; Adam a little shatter'd by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in the great Storm; Eve and the Serpent very flourishing... St. GEORGE in Box; his Arm scarce long enough, but will be in a Condition to stick the Dragon by next April...

DIVERS eminent Modern Poets in Bays, somewhat blight- ed, to be disposed of a Pennyworth...

A third category of extracts, gathered together under the heading "The Progress of Gardening," illustrates develop- ments in landscape design in the third quarter of the 18th century, when Lancelot ("Capability") Brown and Horace Walpole, each in his own distinctive way, established the standards by which the achievement of English gardeners has been judged ever since. The editors point out Walpole's

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