François Boucher - Leda and the Swan (1740)
- Title: Leda and the Swan
- Artist: François Boucher (1703-1770)
- Date: 1740
- Made in: Paris, France
- Medium: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 54 x 65 cm
- Location: Private collection, unknown location
- Photo credit: Michel Motron on studiointernational.com uploaded to Wikimedia in 2014
François Boucher’s "Leda and the Swan" is a Rococo painting, made around 1740–42 in oil on canvas. Boucher, one of the key painters of 18th-century France, specialized in mythological subjects treated as graceful, decorative fantasies, and this picture is very much in that vein. He takes the ancient Greek story of Zeus approaching Leda in the guise of a swan and turns =it into an erotic scene tailored to aristocratic collectors of Louis XV’s court, probably for private and discrete viewing, in a bedroom or a boudoir.
The painting shows Leda reclining on a bed or bank of luxurious fabrics, her body arranged diagonally across the canvas. The setting is only lightly sketched—a bed, a few cushions, drapery, hints of a column fresco—because Boucher wants your attention entirely on the encounter between woman and bird. The result feels like a private scene glimpsed through an unnoticed opening.
Boucher turns the encounter between Leda and Zeus into a dreamlike, private rendezvous. Leda is pulling up her garment and spreading her legs to let the swan approach her vulva. Leda’s pose is languid, her gaze is intrigued, and her attitude generally welcoming the sexual adventure.
The reference to mythology is really an elegant pretext for the display of the nude and an erotic story. Boucher explored the theme more than once, including a less erotic version belonging to the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.