ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Boucher's role in promoting a new consumer-driven market for luxury goods that emerged in Paris during the first half of the eighteenth century. Close visual analysis of works produced during this period reveals how Boucher captured the modern taste for high-end imports while communicating his identity as a collector of art, curiosity, and nature. In seeking to appeal to the tastes of a new generation of wealthy collectors, Boucher's ambition led him to update a series of works by the artist Antoine Watteau that articulated an earlier vision of collecting and connoisseurship. This chapter concludes by exploring the cultural implications of Boucher's vision for the French luxury market as a form of European cosmopolitanism experienced visually in the Swedish home of his patron Carl Gustaf Tessin.
