Detail of Halt at the Spring by Boucher in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, June 2010

Halt at the Spring
1765
François Boucher, French, 1703–1770

Dimensions: 208.6 x 289.9 cm (82 1/8 x 114 1/8 in.)

Medium or Technique: Oil on canvas

Classification: Paintings
Type: Genre - Exterior; Oversize - Horizontal

Accession Number: 71.2

Boucher was the most fashionable and influential French artist of the eighteenth century. He painted major decorative ensembles, portraits, landscapes, and mythological scenes, and also designed tapestries, opera sets, porcelains, and book illustrations. Halt at the Spring was originally a smaller religious painting portraying the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, with Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child at the left. Between 1761 and 1765, the painting was enlarged (the strips of added canvas are visible at the top and sides) and reworked into a picturesque fantasy of peasant life.

Text from: www.mfa.org/collections/object/halt-at-the-spring-30845