Fountain of Venus, 1756

The print

Printed by theprintspace, the East London fine-art lab trusted by artists, galleries and museums. Each print is made to order on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, a heavyweight 308gsm paper made from 100% cotton, with a soft matte surface and a natural white tone, using archival pigment inks made to last for generations.

Photo Rag suits this painting especially well. Its smooth cotton surface adds no texture of its own, so the weave of Boucher’s canvas, the soft grey “stone” figures and the deep greens of the grotto come through exactly as they are.

Sizes available:

50×50cm, 20×20″, fine art print, open edition
70×70cm, 28×28″, fine art print, open edition
100×100cm, 39×39″, fine art print, open edition

Safe, tracked delivery guaranteed worldwide, with sustainable packaging.

The story

François Boucher (1703–1770) was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorator of eighteenth-century France. Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s favourite, admired him greatly, and he designed everything from tapestries and porcelain to theatre sets and court festivities. He spent two decades designing tapestry series for the Beauvais works, became an inspector at the royal Gobelins manufactory, and in 1765 was named First Painter to the King.

Fountain of Venus dates from 1756, and nobody is quite sure what it was for. The Cleveland Museum of Art, which owns it, suggests it was probably first a design for a tapestry, though it may also have been shown as a painting in its own right. It is enormous: the canvas is about 2.3 metres tall and more than 2 metres wide, so even our largest print is less than half the size of the real thing.