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©
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
François Boucher

La Toilette

1742
Oil on canvas.
52.5 x 66.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
58
(
1967.4
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop

Together with Fragonard, Boucher can be considered the quintessential artist of the French Rococo. This French style spread throughout Europe during the 18th century, achieving great splendour outside of France in Austria and Germany. A sense of grace, happiness, lightness, intimacy, piquancy and sexuality are among the features of this style, which expressed itself through scenes of a generally lighthearted, frivolous nature and which extended its influence to a wide range of objects and decoration.

Boucher executed the present canvas during his most fruitful and accomplished period in the decade of the 1740s. Among other masterpieces of that period are The Triumph of Venus (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) of 1740; Diana at the Bath (Musée du Louvre) of 1742; Leda and the Swan (private collection) of 1742; and The Milliner (Nationalmuseum Stockholm) of 1746. La toilette was commissioned from Boucher by Count Karl Gustan Tessin, the Swedish ambassador in Paris to the court of Louis XV between 1736 and 1742. The Count was one of Boucher’s patrons and also owned The Triumph of Venus by the artist as well as works by Chardin, Lancret and Lemoyne. In 1745 he commissioned a series of the Hours of the Day from Boucher, depicted in scenes in which the female figure is the principal motif. The only work now known from that series is The Milliner, dated 1746 (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm).

La toilette was acquired directly from the artist and Tessin paid 648 livres for it. It arrived in Stockholm in June 1742. Following the death of the Count it was auctioned in 1771 along with other works from his collection and entered the Masreliez collection, also in Stockholm. From there it was acquired by Baron E. Cederström in Löfsta. In the early 20th century it was to be found in Vienna in the collection of Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild and later in that of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild. It was on the New York art market in 1967 and from there entered the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection.

The canvas depicts a rather untidy domestic interior in which a lady ties her garter while choosing her cap, shown to her by a maid seen from behind. The setting of this charming, frivolous scene provides an invaluable document with regard to the appearance of 18th-century French interiors. The walls and chairs are covered in a bright yellow fabric, against which the gold of the Chinese screen with birds stands out. The screen conceals the far end of the room and part of a framed pastel of a woman’s head hanging from a blue bow on the end wall. The chairs and dressing table are piled with heavy, rumpled fabrics, while the floor in front of the fire is also crowded with objects such as the bellows, brush, and a fan that echo the similarly disorganised group of objects on the mantelpiece above the fire. Adding to the mood of the interior is the playful little cat that has appropriated a ball of wool or twine from the sewing bag hanging from the fire-screen and is playing with the unravelled thread.

It has been suggested that the model for the principal figure is the artist’s wife Marie-Jeanne Buzot, who posed for some of his paintings. However, portraits of her by the artist, such as the one in the Frick Collection, New York, do not reveal any similarity with the face of the present figure. This, and the fact that the woman is depicted in a rather suggestive form of deshabillé (which would be a somewhat indecorous way for the artist to depict his wife) led Ekserdjian and other authors to reject the idea. Boucher’s scene is a typically voyeuristic one in line with the taste of the time in which the girl reveals her leg in a carefree manner within the context of a normal domestic activity such as getting dressed.

In this composition, in which every object that makes up the scene exudes enormous charm, Boucher used a highly distinctive chromatic range with an emphasis on yellows and large areas of white, red and saturated blues. Two drawings for the principal figures are known: one in the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Orléans and the other in the Institut Néerlandais in Paris.

Mar Borobia

18th Century18th Century - French paintingPaintingOilcanvas
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Tours to find it

The Psyche mirror. El espejo psiqué, 1876
Tours
A Room of One’s Own

A gender perspective on inhabiting interiors.

Products and publications

Set of three soaps La toilette

Set of three soaps La toilette

14.50 €

La Toilette desing fan

La Toilette desing fan

39.49 €

Poster La Toilette by François Boucher .

Poster La Toilette by François Boucher .

12.50 €

La toilette

La toilette

17.00 €

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La Toilette. La toilette, 1742
La Toilette
François Boucher

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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La Toilette. La toilette, 1742
La Toilette
François Boucher

©

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

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