Word: bouchere
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There is one trap of reputation for those rare artists who come to epitomize their age: when the society goes down, so do they. An extreme case in point was François Boucher. The son of a French needlework designer, he became the most successful French painter of the 18th century, the favorite of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Born in 1703, Boucher lived through the climax of the ancien régime and died less than two decades before it did. "In him," wrote Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in their great defense of rococo...
Then the tumbrils rolled over Boucher's luxurious fancies, burying them; the stringent austerity of neoclassical thought wiped them from the roster of "serious" art. Even today, Boucher's work-a fine sampling of which, drawn from North American collections, opened last week at Washington's National Gallery-seems a rather indefensible pleasure. Of course it is not; we have merely been taught to distrust his unalloyed, socially pliable hedonism...
Shepherds and Eggs. Boucher's capacity for work was enormous. By 1770, the year of his death, he had by his own reckoning completed more than 1,000 paintings and some 10,000 drawings-ranging from elaborate pastels like the 1738 portrait of Boy Holding a Carrot (which some critics argue is actually a parsnip) to swift crayon jottings of the nude. Collectors snapped up both his drawings and his rapid oil sketches, such as the vigorous and almost romantic Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs...
...Boucher, as the Goncourts put it, it was "a vocation to leave some trace of his art on every passing manifestation of fashion." The tumbling, rosy cupids and tiny pastoral scenes with shepherds in knee breeches that are the cliches of rococo chinaware decoration were largely Boucher's doing. He painted on fans and carriage doors, snuffboxes, escritoires and ostrich eggs. And when Louis XV put Boucher in control of the state tapestry factories at Beauvais and Gobelin, he brought about the last flourish of grand-scale European weaving. No designer since Boucher has managed to raise tapestry...
...Boucher was an eminently sociable artist but not a profound one. He could take any theme-classical myth, the fete champetre, or fantasies about the Emperor of China-and, decking it with foamy light and gamboling bodies as firm as little pink quails, create from it a microcosm of civility and pleasure. The Allegory of Music (1764) became for Boucher an occasion to gently eroticize the myth; the nuptial flutters of the muse's doves are clearly of more interest than the musical score behind them...