François Boucher, Laundresses in a Landscape, 1760

Throughout his long and hugely successful career as a painter of large-scale mythological decorations, François Boucher also produced smaller, rather delicate pastoral landscapes, like this one, acquired by the Clark in 2002. Boucher's landscapes are often populated by pretty young shepherds and shepherdesses, laundresses and their admirers, coyly engaged in charming, romantic conversations, like the characters in an 18th century comic opera. In this painting, we are invited to peer into a dense, overgrown woodland glade, where slightly fanciful trees grow out of the waters of a gently flowing river, in which two laundresses are washing a basket of clothes. One of the young women stands on the riverbank, holding an infant in her arms, her bright red skirt contrasting nicely with the soft greens of the foliage around her. A washing line can be seen behind her in the woods. The other girl turns aside from her work to look across the painting at a boy who is peeping at them, almost hidden by the branches of a tree on the opposite side of the river. This idyllic scene is a perfect setting for a bit of quiet flirtation. Laundresses in a Landscape was originally intended as one of a pair of canvases. The other, A Landscape with Footbridge, is now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.