François Boucher
Cocktails with a Curator: Boucher's "Four Seasons"
In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, take a closer look at the extraordinary flickers of paint in the colorful canvases of François Boucher’s Four Seasons series with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon. Acquired by Henry Clay Frick late in life, the four paintings were commissioned by Boucher’s great patron Madame de Pompadour—the longtime mistress of King Louis XV—to be placed over doors, hence their unusual shape. The complementary cocktail this week is the Time Regained.
Cocktails with a Curator: Boucher's 'A Lady on Her Day Bed'
In this episode of “Cocktails with a Curator,” Xavier F. Salomon, Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator, examines the life and work of French painter François Boucher, with a focus on “A Lady on Her Daybed.” Discover why Boucher was said to epitomize the taste of the eighteenth century. This week’s complementary cocktail has a kick: the potent French 75, named after the powerful French 75mm field gun.
Cocktail Recipe
French "75"
2/3 gin
1/3 lemon juice
simple syrup
fill up with champagne
Kristel Smentek: "Chinoiseries for Beijing: An Eighteenth-Century French Gift to the Emperor of China"
October 21, 2015
In 1766 a set of chinoiserie tapestries designed by François Boucher was presented to the Qianlong Emperor on behalf of the French administration. This lecture examines the circumstances of the gift and the remarkable Sino-French exchange of art objects it initiated.