This painting beautifully demonstrates François Boucher’s exquisite, if consciously artificial, landscape style during the 1740s. A distant view of the Temple of Tivoli, on the left, is combined with an impossibly tidy French mill to the right. In the eighteenth century this painting belonged to Boucher’s patron and friend, Jean-Claude Gaspard de Sireul, who owned so many drawings by Boucher that his collection was described by contemporaries as ‘Boucher’s portfolio’. Boucher was the most popular painter of his day. The patronage of Madame de Pompadour, to whom he was drawing master, contributed notably to his sparkling success. He designed tapestries for the Beauvais and Gobelins factories and was a Director of the Académie and Principal Painter to the King. His designs were much used by the Vincennes-Sèvres royal porcelain factory to decorate their pieces.