The canvas depicts a rather untidy domestic interior in which a lady ties her garter while choosing her cap, shown to her by a maid seen from behind. The setting of this charming, frivolous scene provides an invaluable
document with regard to the appearance of 18th-century French interiors. The walls and chairs are covered in a bright yellow fabric, against which the gold of the Chinese screen with birds stands out. The screen
conceals the far end of the room and part of a framed pastel of a woman’s head hanging from a blue bow on the end wall. The chairs and dressing table are piled with heavy, rumpled fabrics, while the floor in front
of the fire is also crowded with objects such as the bellows, brush, and a fan that echo the similarly disorganised group of objects on the mantelpiece above the fire. Adding to the mood of the interior is the playful
little cat that has appropriated a ball of wool or twine from the sewing bag hanging from the fire-screen and is playing with the unravelled thread.
It has been suggested that the model for the principal figure is the artist’s wife Marie-Jeanne Buzot, who posed for some of his paintings. However, portraits of her by the artist, such as the one in the Frick Collection,
New York, do not reveal any similarity with the face of the present figure. This, and the fact that the woman is depicted in a rather suggestive form of deshabillé (which would be a somewhat indecorous way for the
artist to depict his wife) led Ekserdjian and other authors to reject the idea. Boucher’s scene is a typically voyeuristic one in line with the taste of the time in which the girl reveals her leg in a carefree manner
within the context of a normal domestic activity such as getting dressed.
In this composition, in which every object that makes up the scene exudes enormous charm, Boucher used a highly distinctive chromatic range with an emphasis on yellows and large areas of white, red and saturated
blues. Two drawings for the principal figures are known: one in the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Orléans and the other in the Institut Néerlandais in Paris.
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