François Boucher

Having returned to France in 1731 Boucher immediately embarked on painting a number of ambitious mythologies, including the Rinaldo and Armida (Private collection) which was his reception piece as newly accepted member of the Académie Royale. He was noticed by King Louis XV who invited him to contribute hunting scenes to decorate the dining room of his apartment at Versailles. During this time, Boucher branched into the painting of genre scenes both low, in the Dutch style such as La Belle Cuisinière (musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris) and high, such as the Family taking Breakfast (musée du Louvre, Paris) modelled on his own family. By 1740, Boucher had reached the peak of his powers which were most perfectly expressed in his tastefully erotic depictions of the female nude. Although he produced many variations on this idea the most elaborate and ambitious was the Triumph of Venus which he painted in 1740 for Count Carl Gustav Tessin, Swedish Ambassador to the French Court. Other examples in this vein followed throughout the 1740s, many painted on the small scale that would have been suitable for the French aristocracy living in cramped apartments at Versailles. Examples of these are the Leda and the Swan and Dark-haired Odalisque both of 1742 and both painted in two versions. Boucher’s combination of exquisite draughtsmanship and freely handled paint was irresistible.

Boucher’s star continued to rise with the patronage of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s official mistress from 1747. For Madame de Pompadour, Boucher painted his few portraits (Alte Pinakotek, Munich and Wallace Collection, London). Madame de Pompadour was a patron of the arts in her own right, purchasing the Sèvres porcelain works for whom Boucher produced numerous designs. She is especially associated with Boucher’s pastorales; in addition to his frequent depictions of flirting country folk, Boucher also painted beautiful landscapes. Even though Boucher remained popular with socially mobile patrons such as Bergeret de Grancourt in the 1760s he was increasingly dismissed by critics, largely on account of what, even then, was considered frivolous and depraved subject matter. Diderot famously said of him, ‘this man has everything except the truth’.

Boucher’s immediate artistic successor was Fragonard but with the advent of Neo-classicism and then the fall of the Ancien Régime in the French Revolution, Boucher and his rococo art was totally rejected. It was not until the late nineteenth century that newly monied collectors with social aspirations, people like the Rothschilds and Henry Clay Frick, that the art of François Boucher returned to favor.