The work on the left is a second scene, or a subsequent scene,
where there is a girl who is asleep and
there is a young man who is not the shepherd, but a young man who is
delivering a basket of flowers from the shepherd as a surprise gift.
So when she wakes up, this mysterious basket, which is the title of the work,
has appeared next to her as a gift, a magical gift from her lover.
These are the basic plots.
It's always about a simple love story between a shepherd and a shepherdess.
Now, when Favart performed these plays his wife was often the main lead.
And that didn't mean she was the shepherdess,
it meant she was the shepherd.
So women conventionally
played both roles.
This is very important when we start to think about how these particular
canvases have been sexed, so to speak.
Because it is quite different from many other eras in which men and
women are depicted.
So for example, in the work on the right,
you see the shepherd, who's in the red coat, playing,
he has his arms around the young woman and he's helping her play a little flute.
Below at her feet is a crown of flowers,
and to her right are the sheep.
It’s very important to realise these aren't real shepherds and
shepherdesses that work in the fields.
They are ideal shepherds and shepherdesses who wander around
the landscape with their sheep, and think about nothing except love.
And so, the sheep in these particular paintings are always perfectly coiffed.
And the really funny thing about it is that woman in this particular period who
had dairies, like Marie Antoinette a little bit later, would often have sheep
and then they would go out in their gardens and walk around with sheep and
they would have these wonderful little pink bows and
they would be perfectly shampooed.
And sometimes they were even imported from places like Spain,
because you wanted the best type of perfect sheep.
But anyway, in this scene you can see that the shepherdess isn't really
engaged with the sheep.
That instead, she's learning her agreeable lesson
from her shepherd who is attempting to woo her.
On the right hand side of the painting is a fountain which refers to this
longer tradition that goes back to the 17th century of a fountain of love.
So, the scene is very much set as an ideal place in nature where a shepherd and
shepherdess have nothing else to do but play music,
lounge around, and really pursue their love of each other.
Now, another important aspect of
this is its connection with aristocratic ways of life.
So, the nobility defined themselves also by not working.
And at this point in the 18th century,
they also had no real military function anymore.
They were courtiers and, in reality,
they spent a great deal of their time pursuing leisure.
Leisure was their primary occupation.
And one aspect of that leisure was the pursuit of love.
So at this stage in 18th century France,
the pursuit of love was a highly codified way of wooing a woman.
And what's important about that is that in making love to
a woman the act of consummation was something that would end the pleasures.
So what you really find in an erotic painting is a coded
way of extending the pleasures of the pursuit of love,
not the consummation of love.
However, part of the pleasure of viewing the work is actually the coded play
that lets you know that the end result of eroticism is often the sexual act.
So, in the painting itself, one of the things you see at
the foot of the young woman is a crown, a crown of flowers.
Now, that of course is a reference to the lover crown.
That when a lover is made the ruler over her lover's heart,
she gets a little crown on her head, or
she might give it over to her lover as his crown.
However, it also had an erotic meaning,
because the circle of the lover was also a reference to
the female body part, the hole, where things go through.
So when you start to actually describe the symbols you start to
realise that the sexuality part of it is something that is very
detached from the visual codes that are highly refined and
enjoyed through an understanding of the motif but never expressed directly.
Now, another aspect of that, Is the actual flute.
The lesson on which she's getting.
Now the flute is very much a reference to the male penis.
And so she's being taught to play it,
is another way of being taught how to play the male sexual part.
So these are the types of codes that are built into these works.
They are visual jokes,
puns that viewers of the time would have instantly recognised.
But part of the pleasure of that is seeing how the crudeness
of sexuality is turned into something that is highly refined and
coded and not understood by everyone, only understood by
people within a small elite circle, who know what the codes mean.
Now, I said that I was going to talk a little bit more about how
Boucher confounds conventions of paintings,
the rules of paintings in ways that also connect with issues of gender.
Now in The Agreeable Lesson,
you see that the male figure is seated above the female figure.
Now that was a convention.
Men were the stronger part, so
men are always placed in a dominant position over the female figure.
There are some wonderful texts by a student of Boucher who wrote
in a diary about his time in Boucher’s studio.
And this young artist's name was Mannlich and was a very important source for
us to know more about what it was like to work in Boucher’s studio.
Boucher had an enormous studio and spent a lot of time.
We know that from Mannlich one of he things that he would do was he would have
students make many, many drawings and Boucher would come in and
sign them at the last minute so he could sell them on.
So he always has his eye on the market a little bit.
But one of the thing that Mannlich tells us about is that Boucher's
correcting the way that his students depict the female body or
draw the female body when he says that the female body should be approached
as if it has no bones at all or hardly any bones.
So, the idea is that they're curved, soft lines.
Nothing that's hard or breaks the eye in a way as it moves around the canvas.
So male figure seated in a dominant position.
Female figure very languid, often as if it has no bones, very gently curved.
And even more importantly, of a finer colour, almost like a porcelain
white colour, where the male figure has more of a sun-kissed look.
That's really an anachronistic way of saying it.
But the male body has more flesh tones.
And it was a way a coding the male figure versus the female figure.
So some of this is through position, and some of it is through colour, and
other aspects of it are through the actual line that the figure Is painted with.
Now, we see this additionally in The Mysterious Basket.
And The Mysterious Basket has a very different kind of male figure.
He does not look like the shepherd.
So, with the shepherd and
shepherdess you almost get the feeling like they're very similar figures.
They have a different colour and a different position, but
it's almost as if they could be swapped.
They wear different clothes, so we know one is the shepherd, but
really their facial features, the refined body lines
all really kind of confuse gender differences.
Now that is not the case with The Mysterious Basket.
You get the lovely shepherdess who's fallen asleep, but you get the figure,
the more rustic figure, who is delivering the basket.
Now this is an important way in terms of the way Boucher has depicted that
figure to show up that he is a rustic.
He's not a shepherd, he's a rustic.
He's a rustic who does a favour for the shepherd but
it's the shepherd who is the stand-in for the noble man.
