Boucher and Chardin : Masters of Modern Manners

Accompanying an exhibition at the Wallace Collection, this catalog will seek to examine relationships between these two works and their creation, focusing on establishing common threads drawn from contemporary French social and cultural history. When seen together, the two paintings acquire a new resonance, showing the imaginative and Parisian response of two very different painters to a new interest in scenes from everyday life. The paintings are examined in the context of a dozen further works by the artists, and prints, drawings, books and decorative art objects including oriental textiles and porcelain. This provides an opportunity to address undercurrent social history themes, such as the artists’ attitudes to fashion, interior decoration, and even the consumption of tea – a pastime borne from the contemporary fashion in eighteenth-century France and Great Britain for anything oriental, influenced by new trade links with China.