Country Loves, Pierre Antoine Baudouin 18th Century

Country loves, gouache by a painter from the entourage of Pierre Antoine Baudoin or by a follower from the end of the 18th century or the beginning of the 19th century.
Very good condition. Old mounting and Louis XVI frame.

Pierre-Antoine Baudouin is the son of an engraver. He became the student and then the son-in-law of Boucher, who was his master in painting and genre.
He married, in fact, the youngest daughter of François Boucher, Marie-Émilie, on April 8, 1758. He then specialized in gouache miniatures that he exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1761. He was received as a member of the Royal Academy in 1763 with a small gouache of a historical subject Phryne accused of impiety before the Areopagus, (Paris, Louvre Museum) and he subsequently painted illustrations of biblical episodes.
However, he made his reputation above all as a designer of libertine scenes in a contemporary setting. Such gouaches were exhibited at the Salon from 1763 to 1769. Some were condemned by the Archbishop of Paris and even by Diderot - himself the author of libertine novels under a pseudonym - who wrote: "Greuze has made himself a painter, preacher of good morals; Baudouin, painter, preacher of bad. Greuze, painter of families and honest people; Baudouin, painter of small houses and libertines". And the latter added by way of portrait: "A likeable guy, easy-going, full of spirit and somewhat inclined to lead a dissolute life; but what have I to fear, my wife is over forty-five years old! »
One of his masterpieces is undoubtedly the suite of four gouaches entitled Les quatre heures du jour (1753) which De Ghendt transposed onto copper with great delicacy of tone (1765).
A certain number of his works are directly inspired by Boucher's pastoral love scenes but the attention to moral themes and details demonstrates that he was also influenced by Jean-Baptiste Greuze.
He naturally received commissions from the Court. On 20 November 1763, he was elected a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture and was appointed painter to the king. In 1766, he painted two portraits for the king and a Suite de la vie de la Vierge (Suite of the life of the Virgin) in 1767 for Mme du Barry, then Louis XV's favourite and a wise patron.
Baudouin was undoubtedly a mentor for Fragonard in libertine iconography. From 1765, they shared the studio of the late painter Jean-Baptiste Deshays de Colleville at the Louvre — of whom Baudouin was the brother-in-law by marriage. In 1767, they requested to go and copy Rubens' paintings together at the Luxembourg Palace. At the time of Baudouin's early death in 1769, Fragonard's drawings and paintings abounded in his studio. Baudouin was one of the most popular draftsmen of the last decades of the Ancien Régime. In 1760, at the Testard sale, one of his small gouaches found a buyer for 1,750 livres. He received commissions from important collectors such as the Marquis de Marigny. Several of his gouaches engraved by Nicolas Ponce, such as Annette and Lubin