Shop art print and framed art La toilette de Vénus by François Boucher

The Toilet of Venus or Venus Getting Ready is an oil painting on canvas produced in 1751 by the painter François Boucher, a master of the Rococo style. It is one of his best-known works. Venus is seated naked on a sumptuous rococo sofa, in a sumptuous interior whose hangings reveal the foliage of a garden in the background. Three little putti accompany the goddess and help her get ready, one arranging her hair, the other passing her a ribbon and, below, the third lifting pearl necklaces from a silver dish. In her hand, the goddess holds one of two doves, a bird that has symbolised her since Minoan times. The work was commissioned by Boucher's patron, the Marquise de Pompadour, an influential lover of King Louis XV, for the vestibule of her Bellevue residence. With Boucher, sumptuous Baroque France became a galante rocaille France. The best representative of the period's tastes and its main author, Boucher used his imagination and virtuosity to create mainly pastoral, bucolic and mythological themes dedicated to the love of the gods. In particular, he devoted no fewer than fifty paintings to Venus. The Goncourt brothers explain how the luminosity and light, soft tones of his pictorial works served the decorative exuberance fashionable at the [...]

 

This artwork is a painting from the classical period. It belongs to the rococo style.

 

« La toilette de Vénus » is kept at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.

 

Find the full description of La toilette de Vénus by François Boucher on Wikipedia.