Eric Zafran, The Rococo age: French masterpieces of the eighteenth century, (Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 1983).
","citation":"Eric Zafran, The Rococo age: French masterpieces of the eighteenth century, (Atlanta, GA: High Museum of Art, 1983).
, p. 53; fig. II.1","date":1983,"id":4858,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/10070576"},{"boilertext":"Lazare Duvaux, Livre-Journal de Lazare Duvaux, marchand-bijoutier ordinaire du roy, 1748-1758: précédé d'une étude sur le goût et sur le commerce des objets d'art au milieu du XVIIIe siècle, et accompagné d'une table alphabétique des noms d'hommes ... mentionnés dans le journal, etc., (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles Français, 1873).","citation":"Lazare Duvaux, Livre-Journal de Lazare Duvaux, marchand-bijoutier ordinaire du roy, 1748-1758: précédé d'une étude sur le goût et sur le commerce des objets d'art au milieu du XVIIIe siècle, et accompagné d'une table alphabétique des noms d'hommes ... mentionnés dans le journal, etc., (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles Français, 1873)., Vol. 1: p. 185","date":1873,"id":4927,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/563153628"},{"boilertext":"Edmond & Jules de Goncourt, L’art du dix-huitième siècle, (Paris: A. Quantin, 1880-1882).","citation":"Edmond & Jules de Goncourt, L’art du dix-huitième siècle, (Paris: A. Quantin, 1880-1882)., p. 189, 191, 207","date":1880,"id":4928,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/83319572"},{"boilertext":"Andre Michel, François Boucher, (Paris: Librairie de l'art, 1889).","citation":"Andre Michel, François Boucher, (Paris: Librairie de l'art, 1889)., p. 74","date":1889,"id":4929,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/493781958"},{"boilertext":"Fernand Engerand, Inventaire des tableaux commandés et achetés par la Direction des batiments du roi (1709-1792), (Paris: E. Leroux, 1900).","citation":"Fernand Engerand, Inventaire des tableaux commandés et achetés par la Direction des batiments du roi (1709-1792), (Paris: E. Leroux, 1900)., p. 45-50","date":1900,"id":4930,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/829586624"},{"boilertext":"Gustave Kahn, Boucher: biographie critique, illustrée de vingt-quatre reproductions hors textes, (Paris: H. Laurens, 1904).","citation":"Gustave Kahn, Boucher: biographie critique, illustrée de vingt-quatre reproductions hors textes, (Paris: H. Laurens, 1904)., p. 99","date":1904,"id":4931,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/3259588"},{"boilertext":"Andre Michel, Louis Soullie and C Masson, François Boucher, (Paris: H. Piazza, 1906).","citation":"Andre Michel, Louis Soullie and C Masson, François Boucher, (Paris: H. Piazza, 1906)., no. 85","date":1906,"id":4932,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/7411547"},{"boilertext":"Pierre de Nolhac and Georges Pannier, François Boucher, premier peintre du roi, 1703-1770, (Paris: Goupil, 1907).","citation":"Pierre de Nolhac and Georges Pannier, François Boucher, premier peintre du roi, 1703-1770, (Paris: Goupil, 1907)., p. 61; p. 111","date":1907,"id":4933,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/10355080"},{"boilertext":"Pierre de Nolhac, François Boucher, premier peintre du Roi, 1703-1770, (Paris: H. Floury, 1925).","citation":"Pierre de Nolhac, François Boucher, premier peintre du Roi, 1703-1770, (Paris: H. Floury, 1925)., p. 123","date":1925,"id":4934,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/459091542"},{"boilertext":"Georges Wildenstein, \"Un amateur de Boucher et de Fragonard Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret (1715-1785)\", Gazette des beaux-arts 57/58 (n.s. 6) (Jul.-Aug. 1961): p. 39-84.","citation":"Georges Wildenstein, \"Un amateur de Boucher et de Fragonard Jacques-Onésyme Bergeret (1715-1785)\", Gazette des beaux-arts 57/58 (n.s. 6) (Jul.-Aug. 1961): p. 39-84., p. 63","date":1961,"id":4935,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/888506242"},{"boilertext":"Alexandre Ananoff, François Boucher, (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1976).","citation":"Alexandre Ananoff, François Boucher, (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1976)., Vol. 2: p. 25-27, no. 328","date":1976,"id":4936,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/2773760"},{"boilertext":"18th century French paintings drawings and sculpture: 6 June-7 July 1978, David Carritt Limited, London., (London: D. Carritt Ltd, 1978).","citation":"18th century French paintings drawings and sculpture: 6 June-7 July 1978, David Carritt Limited, London., (London: D. Carritt Ltd, 1978)., no. 1 (illus.)","date":1978,"id":4937,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/13814919"},{"boilertext":"Jean-Luc Bordeaux, \"La commande royale de 1724 pour l'Hôtel du Grand Maître à Versailles\", Gazette des beaux-arts 104 (n.s. 6) (1984): p. 113-126.
","citation":"Jean-Luc Bordeaux, \"La commande royale de 1724 pour l'Hôtel du Grand Maître à Versailles\", Gazette des beaux-arts 104 (n.s. 6) (1984): p. 113-126.
, p. 119","date":1984,"id":4938,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/888558432"},{"boilertext":"Francois Boucher, François Boucher, 1703-1770: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 17-May 4, 1986, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, May 27-August 17, 1986, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Grand Palais, Paris, September 19, 1986-January 5, 1987, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986).","citation":"Francois Boucher, François Boucher, 1703-1770: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 17-May 4, 1986, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, May 27-August 17, 1986, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Grand Palais, Paris, September 19, 1986-January 5, 1987, (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986)., p. 240, cat. no. 55; p. 242 (illus.)","date":1986,"id":4939,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/473224935"},{"boilertext":"Edith Appleton Standen, \"The 'Fragments d'Opéra': a series of Beauvais tapestries after Boucher\", Metropolitan Museum journal 21 (1986); p. 123-137.","citation":"Edith Appleton Standen, \"The 'Fragments d'Opéra': a series of Beauvais tapestries after Boucher\", Metropolitan Museum journal 21 (1986); p. 123-137., p. 125, fig. 4; p. 127","date":1986,"id":4940,"uri":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/1512826"},{"boilertext":"Cara Dufour Denison, French master drawings from the Pierpont Morgan Library, (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1993).","citation":"Cara Dufour Denison, French master drawings from the Pierpont Morgan Library, (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1993)., p. 122","date":1993,"id":4941,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/29579025"},{"boilertext":"Artemis 91-92: consolidated audited annual report: annual general meeting, 22 January 1993, (Luxembourg: Artemis Group, 1993).","citation":"Artemis 91-92: consolidated audited annual report: annual general meeting, 22 January 1993, (Luxembourg: Artemis Group, 1993)., p. 26 (illus.)","date":1993,"id":4942,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/37998166"},{"boilertext":"Betsy Rosasco and Norman Muller, A royal commission: François Boucher's Water and Earth reunited:Princeton University Art Museum, March 13-May 13, 2010, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2010).","citation":"Betsy Rosasco and Norman Muller, A royal commission: François Boucher's Water and Earth reunited:Princeton University Art Museum, March 13-May 13, 2010, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2010).","date":2010,"id":4943,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/642177468"},{"boilertext":"Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013)","citation":"Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 205","date":2013,"id":1994,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/865020505"},{"boilertext":"Jan Van der Marck, In Quest of Excellence: Civic Pride, Patronage, Connoisseurship (Miami, FL: Center for the Fine Arts, 1984).","citation":"Jan Van der Marck, In Quest of Excellence: Civic Pride, Patronage, Connoisseurship (Miami, FL: Center for the Fine Arts, 1984)., p. 186; p. 163 (color illus.)","date":1984,"id":2719,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/11469730"},{"boilertext":"Alastair Laing, Boucher's Drawings: Who and What Were They For? (New York: The Morgan Library and Museum, 2016).","citation":"Alastair Laing, Boucher's Drawings: Who and What Were They For? (New York: The Morgan Library and Museum, 2016).","date":2016,"id":6852,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/930026829"},{"boilertext":"Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Fragonard amoureux: galant et libertin (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux : Musée du Luxembourg-Sénat, 2015).","citation":"Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Fragonard amoureux: galant et libertin (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux : Musée du Luxembourg-Sénat, 2015).","date":2015,"id":6858,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/929921276"},{"boilertext":"Colin B. Bailey, The first painters of the King: French royal taste from Louis XIV to the Revolution, (New York: Stair Sainty Matthiesen, 1985).","citation":"Colin B. Bailey, The first painters of the King: French royal taste from Louis XIV to the Revolution, (New York: Stair Sainty Matthiesen, 1985)., p. 134; no. 80 (illus.)","date":1985,"id":4175,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/13153199"},{"boilertext":"Betsy J. Rosasco, \"François Boucher's Water and Earth: postscript to an exhibition,\" Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 73 (2014): p. 20–36.","citation":"Betsy J. Rosasco, \"François Boucher's Water and Earth: postscript to an exhibition,\" Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 73 (2014): p. 20–36., p. 20, fig. 1","date":2014,"id":2979,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/907406338"},{"boilertext":"Alexandra Tauvry, \"Little grunts, the grins and grimaces of recognition: Resistance and Exchange in Paul Muldoon and Northman MacBeath's Plan B,\" in Revue LISA, vol. 12, no. 3 (2014). ","citation":"Alexandra Tauvry, \"Little grunts, the grins and grimaces of recognition: Resistance and Exchange in Paul Muldoon and Northman MacBeath's Plan B,\" in Revue LISA, vol. 12, no. 3 (2014). ","date":2014,"id":1478,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/6006826129"},{"boilertext":"Norman Muller, \"François Boucher's Water and Earth: postscript to an exhibition: technical examination,\" Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 73 (2014): p. 30–36.","citation":"Norman Muller, \"François Boucher's Water and Earth: postscript to an exhibition: technical examination,\" Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 73 (2014): p. 30–36., p. 30, figs. 13–14; p. 31, fig. 16","date":2014,"id":2982,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/907406338"},{"boilertext":"Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986)","citation":"Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 96 (illus.)","date":1986,"id":1899,"uri":"https://search.worldcat.org/title/14244748"},{"boilertext":"\"Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1980\", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 40, no. 1 (1981): p. 14-31.","citation":"\"Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1980\", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 40, no. 1 (1981): p. 14-31., p. 14; p. 15 (illus.)","date":1981,"id":3490,"uri":"https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774603"}],"nowebuse":"False","periods":[],"department":"European Painting and Sculpture ","attribute_groups":[{"id":2199321,"term":"European Art","termtype":"Collecting Area"},{"id":2199338,"term":"Nazi-era gaps","termtype":"Provenance & Cultural Heritage"}],"daterange":"A.D. 1700-1800","dateend":1748,"depicted":[],"titles":[{"title":"Arion on the Dolphin","titletype":"Primary Title","displayorder":1}],"hasimage":"true","creditlinerepro":"","objectnumber":"y1980-2","inscribed":null,"texts":[{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Multivocal Label","textentryhtml":"\n\tA work of intense drama and sensuous flourish, this painting was intended to decorate the gaming room of a pleasure retreat for France’s King Louis XV. Boucher based his watery scene on an opera-ballet that enacts the adventures of Arion, an ancient poet who is captured by pirates and rescued by dolphins from a storm-tossed sea. Viewers would have associated Boucher’s lyre-playing dreamboat with the French monarch, who as a toddler had survived measles to emerge as the dauphin (literally “dolphin”), the heir to the throne. The surrounding sea nymphs, meanwhile, may have conjured the siren call of such royal mistresses as Madame de Pompadour. Aquatic themes were common in Rococo art and appropriate for a room devoted to games of chance and risk. Here they recall the perils of sea travel and the thwarted maritime ambitions of France, whose naval overhaul after another disastrous war coincided with the painting’s creation.\n
\n\n\tMeredith Martin, Class of 1997, Professor of Art History, New York University\n
\n\n\tGillian Weiss, Class of 1992, Professor of History, Case Western Reserve University\n
","remarks":"EUR2_02-05_WLA-Day 1 Cataloguing "},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Handbook Entry","textentryhtml":"\r\nThis painting was commissioned as one of a series of four panels representing the Elements, which were to crown the doors in Château de La Muette, the hunting lodge and retreat of Louis XV. Boucher executed only Water (Arion) and Earth (Vertumnus and Pomona, Columbus Museum of Art); no evidence of designs for Air and Fire exists. He took the subjects from the opera-ballet Les Élémens (The Elements), in which the king had performed as a child. The libretto adapts an episode from Herodotus’s Histories: while at sea, the lyrist Arion arouses the greed of his fellow voyagers, who plot to rob and kill him. Arion convinces them to allow him a last hymn to Apollo, after which he jumps into the sea and is saved by a dolphin. In the opera, a storm destroys the plotters and their ship as the dolphin conveys Arion to the siren Leucosie, with whom he falls in love. French audiences would have understood Arion as Louis XV, who had survived the epidemic that killed his father and older brother to become the heir apparent to the throne, or dauphin — a word meaning also \"dolphin.\"\r\nAs royal mistress, the charming and musical Mme de Pompadour reenacted selections from the opera for the entertainment of the king and his friends. When La Muette was renovated in 1746–47 and Boucher was commissioned to paint the overdoors, the affair was in full swing; by 1750 it had ended, which may explain the premature termination of the series and eventual return of Water and Earth to Boucher’s inventory.\r\nIn Arion on the Dolphin, the lone dolphin has become a fantastic sea-monster with a cortege of nereids and tritons, which Boucher depicts with naturalistic accuracy from the waist up (particularly the central triton’s face) and with fanciful flourish to the tip of each curling fishtail. The movement of Arion astride the triton and dolphin opposes the languor of the reclining, floating figures. This tension between motion and stasis is visible also in the water, which so foams with turbulence that the waves seem thick and solid. Still, the overall effect is light and airy: even the yellows of the lightning and flaming shipwreck are soft against the blues of sky and sea. This palette also reveals the influence of Watteau, whose drawings the young Boucher spent several years converting into prints. ","remarks":null},{"texttype":"Online","textpurpose":"Provenance","textentryhtml":"French Royal Collection, 1749 (?); Jacques-Onesyme Bergeret, Paris, 1764; Bergeret sale, Paris, April 24, 1786, lot 49; private collection, Paris; Artemis, 1980; purchased by the Princeton University Art Museum.","remarks":null}],"datebegin":1748,"sortnumber":"1980 2y","published_date":"2026-02-11 10:29:05.309886","objectid":32343,"dimensions":"86 × 135.5 cm (33 7/8 × 53 3/8 in.)\r\nframe: 117.5 × 167.5 × 11.4 cm (46 1/4 × 65 15/16 × 4 1/2 in.)","on_view":true}