Collection Online as of February 1, 2023
Plate Depicting the Soap Bubble Blower (La souffleuse de savon)
Salt-glazed, transfer-printed stoneware
Gift of R. Thornton Wilson in memory of his wife, Florence Ellsworth Wilson 1948.118
Location
not on view
Description
English potteries often courted aristocratic clients with cheaper wares that looked like more expensive works from the major centers of porcelain production in the eighteenth century, especially France, Germany, and China. In this case, the image printed in center of the plate depicts a young lady, enticing a boy with her skill at blowing soap bubbles through a thin pipe. The print was taken from an etching by Jean Daullé (French, 1703–1763), of the painting La souffleuse de savon (1758) by Francois Boucher (French, 1703–1770).
François Boucher
French Rococo artist who epitomizes the frivolous and elegant court life of France in the mid-18th century. During his early career he was closely associated with Watteau, many of whose paintings he engraved. Boucher was a successful and incredibly prolific artistic who had a major impact on both fine and decorative art of the 18th century. He is particularly noted for having reinvented the genre of the pastoral, creating images of shepherds and shepherdesses as sentimental lovers that was taken up in a variety of medium. Boucher's sketchy manner of painting helped to promote painterliness as an end in itself. This trend dominated French painting until the emergence of Neoclassicism, when the tides of criticism turned against Boucher and his followers.