A Beauvais Mythological Tapestry

After a cartoon by François Boucher, woven under direction of Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Nicolas Besnier, Mid 18th Century

depicting Zephyr Leading Psyche into the Palace of Love.
11 feet 10 inches x 20 feet 7 inches.

Property from the American University Museum, Washington, D.C.

Provenance:

French & Co., New York

Collection of William A. Clark (American, 1839-1925)

Corcoran Gallery of Art (acquired in 1928)

Literature:

Ananoff, Alexandre and Daniel Wildenstein, François Boucher, vol. 1 (La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1976), 305-306.

Note:

François Boucher produced a series of five cartoons for the Beauvais Manufactory depicting the life of Psyche. This scene was sent to the looms in 1741 and was produced until 1770. There were nine examples of this scene produced [1]. The present tapestry is signed ‘Besnier et Oudry À Beauvais’ which confirms that it dates before 1754, during the combined years of directorship of Beauvais by Jean-Baptiste Oudry and Nicolas Besnier. This may be one of a complete set of five scenes that were commissioned in 1746, the other four displayed in the Sala degli Arazzi of the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome; this scene possibly separated in the nineteenth century [2]. Other examples of this scene are currently held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Musée du Petit Palais, and the Art Institute of Chicago has the left and right sections.

[1] Block, Maurice, François Boucher and the Beauvais Tapestries (The Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 13-14.

[2] The J. Paul Getty Museum, French Tapestries and Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum (J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), 117.

Illustrated:

The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Antiquities to Impressionism: The William A. Clark Collection (The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2001), 21 (fig.12).

(Getty example) The J. Paul Getty Museum, French Tapestries and Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum (J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), 108 (fig. A)