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Mars and Venus Mars and Venus
© Fitzwilliam Museum

Mars and Venus

François Boucher

Art Funded
1980
Dimensions
58 x 66 cm
Vendor
Colnaghi
A sketch for one of the tapestries illustrating Les Amours des Dieux.

Woven by the Beauvais factory to Boucher's designs in 1749.

Provenance

Auguiot sale, Hotel Drouot, Paris, 1875; Duc de Bojano posthumous sale, Hotel Drouot, Paris, 1882.

Oil on canvas

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Renoir's La Place Clichy presents a charming and apparently spontaneous impression of Parisian life. It is easy to see from this picture why one commentator described the artist as 'the true painter of young women, the bloom of whose skin, velvet flesh, darting eye, and elegant finery, he renders with sunlit gaiety.'

The 14th-century Macclesfield Psalter contains delightfully surreal marginal illustrations, including a dog dressed as a bishop, a rabbit riding a hound, and a series of grotesque figures with faces in their bottoms and legs emerging from their shoulders.

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