In Boucher’s pastorals, the dirt and labor of peasant life were set aside in favor of the elegant clothing and idyllic romance popularized by theater pantomimes. Such playacted visions were the roots of Marie Antoinette’s adoption of simple dress and manners at her pleasure dairy, a type of faux-rustic hamlet, at the Château de Versailles. The simplicity of Boucher’s subject belies the complexity of the composition, which is organized around a series of intersecting diagonals. Much admired at the Salon of 1753, this painting was one of a pair of overdoors set into the woodwork of Madame de Pompadour’s Château de Bellevue.
This picture, titled in French Le Sommeil interrompu, had as its pendant The Love Letter (National Gallery of Art, Washington), which was engraved as Les deux Confidantes. Each painting shows stylish figures in colorful, elaborate peasant costumes accompanied by scrupulously clean sheep and dogs in a sunny landscape. Each is signed and dated 1750. Presumably, they were exhibited as a pair at the Salon of 1753 and are described in the catalogue, under one number, as overdoors from Bellevue, a château built for and belonging to Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), official mistress of King Louis XV (1710–1774). The paintings were noticed and well received in the critical literature. The subject of the present work, a young man tickling a sleeping girl with a blade of straw, had been popular with seventeenth-century Dutch genre painters, by whom Boucher may have been influenced. It has also been pointed out that he was a contemporary and friend of Charles Simon Favart (1710–1792), and that scene four of Favart’s comic opera Les Vendanges de Tempé includes a vignette in which the Little Shepherd tickles the sleeping shepherdess, Lisette. More generally, the eclogues of Bernard de Fontenelle (1657–1757) were cited by the artist’s contemporaries as a possible source of inspiration for such elegant pastoral subjects, for which he was chiefly famous.
The couple from The Interrupted Sleep, with slight variations and in reverse, appears at the right edge of a large, horizontal Beauvais tapestry titled The Fountain of Love (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California). The two shepherdesses from the Washington picture, also reversed, are next to the figures from this picture in the tapestry. While the first weaving of the Beauvais tapestry was not until 1755, what seems to be a full-scale cartoon for the left half (the joined fragments are in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles) was signed and dated by Boucher in 1748. Boucher was notably prolific, and while he had a fertile imagination, he must often have been under pressure of time, and he constantly revised and reused successful motifs. No drawings for our painting have been identified, but it was a much admired composition, as it was repeatedly engraved. The most important of the prints, by Nicolas Dauphin de Beauvais (1687–1763), describes it as from the collection of Madame de Pompadour. Originally, when set in the woodwork at Bellevue, the two overdoors had more complex, irregular, typically rococo shapes.
