Oil painting, 'Feeding Ducks', François Bocion, Swiss school, ca. 1850

A woman in front of a house feeds ducks in the courtyard, the upper part of the house is constituted of a small tower flanked by a loggia on the left, where stand two figures, the roof is covered with vegetation.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend

Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, listed in the 1868 post-mortem register of the contents of his villa in Lausanne (V&A R/F MA/1/T1181) as 'An Oil on Canvas. Feeding Ducks. By F. Bocion. In frame. Signed. Swiss. Present century'; bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868.

Historical significance: This painting is one of a group of 16 paintings bequeathed to the museum by the Rev. Townshend who had a villa in Lausanne where he spent the winter.
Although the thematic of the leman lake is central in his oeuvre, Bocion also executed rustic subjects such as the present one dominated by a direct observation after the motif and the care of realistic rendering.
It is unclear here whether the scene is meant to illustrate a contemporary scene or from the past. The loggia where two figures appeared slightly reminiscent of the troubadour style, a genre close to history paintings which was developed in the early 19th century. Bocion made his debut as a history painter and this painting may therefore be dated quite early in his career c. 1850.
This painting was bought by the Rev. Townshend and displayed in his villa in Lausanne (Switzerland). It completed there a large collection of 19th-century landscapes paintings and it is not unlikely that he knew personally the artist.

François Bocion (1828-1890) was born in Lausanne. He first trained with Christian Gottlieb Steinlen (1779-1847) in Vevey and subsequently with François Bonnet (1811-1894) in Lausanne. In Paris in 1845, Bocion entered the atelier of Louis-Aimé Grosclaude (1784-1869) and later that of Charles Gleyre (1806-1874) and befriended Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and other important exponents of the Realist movement. Back in Lausanne in 1849 he became a teacher at the Ecole moyenne et industrielle of Lausanne, a position he held until his death. At the same time, he had an extensive output with several travels abroad. He exhibited in Paris, Vienna, Anvers, London and was a founder member of the Swiss society of watercolorists (1884).

This painting presents a genre scene composed of small figures and a house of remarkable architecture, slightly reminiscent of medieval construction. Bocion, who started as a history painter, may therefore have executed this composition fairly early in his career. The rustic subject matter is also characteristic of the Realist and Naturalist approach emerged in the 1840s in France. After the 1850s, Bocion focused on the depiction of scenes by the Lake Leman, which became a recurrent thematic of his oeuvre.

1585-1869