BOUCHER, François

This painting and its companion piece, An Autumn Pastoral (also in the Wallace Collection), were commissioned by the financier Trudaine for his new château at Montigny-Lencoup, together with four overdoors by Oudry which are also in the Wallace Collection.

These great pastorals offer a characteristic Boucher blend of elegance and ruticity.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 10 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in G minor RV 315 op. 8. No. 2 (Summer)

Boucher had never been a committed artistic believer. Although he had worked in Italy, the Italian tradition did not tempt him into vast imaginative schemes. He never aimed at a heroic vision. He expressed no glorious promises about heaven: either as an Olympian refuge for aristocratic families, or in ordinary Christian terms. Like most French eighteenth-century painters, he could not evolve a satisfactory idiom for religious pictures of any kind; and he was particularly unsuited to the task by the nature of his real abilities.

The picture shows one of his rare paintings of religious subject.

Although they bear different dates, Boucher’s two allegories, the Allegory of Painting and the Allegory of Music have been associated with each other since they came to light in the late nineteenth century. Virtually identical in size, their compositions are well balanced and their subjects complementary. The low viewpoints of the two paintings and the broad handling of the brushwork suggest that they were intended as overdoors, to be placed high in a decorative scheme where close examination would not have been possible. In each picture the arts of Painting and Music are personified as beautiful young women, surrounded by attributes appropriate to their arts and are doted by winged putti, who engage in playful activities.

This canvas and its companion-piece, Allegory of Poetry, are examples of the small scale allegorical pictures which were created by Boucher to decorate the homes, and more specifically, overdoors within the intricately carved boiserie paneling that was installed in many mid-18th century Parisian h�tels.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 2 minutes):

Jean-Philippe Rameau: Castor et Pollux, March

Although they bear different dates, Boucher’s two allegories, the Allegory of Painting and the Allegory of Music have been associated with each other since they came to light in the late nineteenth century. Virtually identical in size, their compositions are well balanced and their subjects complementary. The low viewpoints of the two paintings and the broad handling of the brushwork suggest that they were intended as overdoors, to be placed high in a decorative scheme where close examination would not have been possible. In each picture the arts of Painting and Music are personified as beautiful young women, surrounded by attributes appropriate to their arts and are doted by winged putti, who engage in playful activities.

This canvas and its companion-piece, Allegory of Music, are examples of the small scale allegorical pictures which were created by Boucher to decorate the homes, and more specifically, overdoors within the intricately carved boiserie paneling that was installed in many mid-18th century Parisian h�tels.

Boucher’s pastorals and landscape paintings, which are certainly part of his rococo achievement, are willfully artificial on a basis of real observation. They create a new branch of rococo art in which the growing tendency to shake off dynastic and mythological duties has been completely developed.

This painting and its companion piece, A Summer Pastoral (also in the Wallace Collection), were commissioned by the financier Trudaine for his new château at Montigny-Lencoup, together with four overdoors by Oudry which are also in the Wallace Collection.

These great pastorals offer a characteristic Boucher blend of elegance and ruticity.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in F major RV 293 op. 8 No. 3 (Autumn)

The subject of the love of Apollo and the shepherdess Isse is taken from Ovid’s metamorphoses. The painting was commissioned from Boucher in 1749 by the Direction des Bâtiments du Roi.

By this painting the beholder is carried away into an idyllic world of bliss. Boucher is a master of salacious scenes and plays artfully with a number of sensuous charms: the flesh tones of the pale skin, the soft and smooth fabrics, the colours and also the lighting of the painting.

The painting represents the portrait of Louise O’Murphy, a young Irish woman who worked as Boucher’s model and who, in 1753, was briefly the mistress of Louis XV. The artist does not present her as a Venus of classical beauty but portrays her instead in a provocative pose of unambiguously erotic persuasion as a sweet child-woman.

In spite of the high esteem in which Boucher was held by the public of the day they frequently criticized the artificiality of his “porcelain heads” and his delicately coloured interiors. Here, too, his handling of colour is delicate in the extreme, creating a powdery surface with- out depth in which the hues are brought together by the use of white as a common ground. There are neither deep shadows nor sombre contrasts of light and shade. The white ground also takes the edge off the primary triad of red, yellow and blue, diluted here to discreet shades of pink, pale yellow and light blue. The unapproachable, aloof beauty is dethroned and a pretty little coquette is put in her place.

The painting is also known as the Back Nude of Mlle O’Murphy.

It can be assumed that the painting represents Madame Boucher, the artist’s wife.

The fashion of “chinoiserie” was associated with Rococo in France, and in other countries including England and Holland, which were major importers of porcelain figures and exotic screens. Lacquered and ceramic objects popularised such motifs, as did tapestries. Boucher’s Chinese Dance is a cartoon for The Chinese Tapestry woven at Beauvais in 1743.

This painting is unquestionably Boucher’s masterpiece. As a decorative artist, Boucher had amazing facility; in this painting, done for the Salon in 1742, he wished to excel himself. It places him in the ranks of the great masters, and on looking at it one begins to realize how gifted he was, even though he did not always make full use of his talent.

The slender nudes and the hunting theme recall the School of Fontainebleau, of which certain traditions persist in the eighteenth century. The paint surface is intact, and the old varnish, which contains no artificial colouring, gives it a slightly golden tone.

The painting is a masterpiece in the true classical manner; the technique is not too obvious, all the values are harmoniously balanced, and the elegance of the drawing and the purity of the forms are more important than the more sensual charms of colour.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 19 minutes):

Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme

Tiepolo’s chilly women are stripped by Boucher to complete nudity, warmed by love or lust, and made always girls before they are goddesses. The trappings of mythology are increasingly only different wrappings for the same offering, guaranteed not to interfere with contemplation of the woman even if she is supposed to be Diana after the Hunt. Thus, while the stage is equipped with false trees or false doves, truth is present in the observation of naked bodies, draperies that set them off, and - most caressingly - in the texture of flesh conveyed by paint.

Pastoral scenes - so-called pastorale - were typical of French painting under Louis XV. They developed from the “fêtes galantes” of Antoine Watteau, who depicted courtiers disporting themselves in park-like landscapes, and from the “fêtes champêtres” - the rural festivals of Jean-Baptiste Pater, who combined court and country life. Boucher was the first to create high-quality pastorale, laying down the standards for the genre and showing idealised scenes from the love life of amorous shepherds and shepherdesses.

This is a slightly different version of the painting in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

The mythological story depicted in the painting is the following.

For murdering his friend Iphitus in a fit of madness Hercules was sold as a slave to Omphale, queen of Lydia, for three years (Apollodorus 2.6:3). But she soon alleviated his lot by making him her lover. While in her service he grew effeminate, wearing women’s clothes and adornments, and spinning yarn.

The subject, portraying one of the hero’s errors, inspired Boucher to paint one of the most audaciously erotic and best-executed canvases of the century - an agitated, brilliant composition full of wit and joyous verve, which Boucher would only rarely equal afterward.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

Camille Saint-Saens: Le rouet d’Omphale (Omphale’s Spinning Wheel), symphonic poem op. 31

Boucher was employed on tapestry design for the Beauvais factory. He produced for Beauvais his enchanting Chinese subjects (‘sujet chinois’), decorative, flippant and deft, presenting palm trees, doll-like people, feathery hats, suggesting a generalized, amusing exoticism. One of the most delightful of this set is La Pêche chinoise (The Chinese Fishing).

In the same way that nudity was finally emancipated in Rococo art, landscape rid itself of the last vestiges of narrative. Born of the artist’s imagination and deriving conflict-free unity from this, the scene nonetheless consists entirely of details, including the girl calmly doing the laundry, the thoughtful boy next to her, and the doves fluttering above the roof of the cottage.

It is thought that the portrait represents Marguerite Jos�phe Richard, the first wife of Pierre Jacques On�syme Bergeret (1715-1785), one of Boucher’s most enthusiastic patrons and the first owner of the painting. The painting is signed and dated, but the date of 1746 on the centre left of the painting is spurious.

Boucher painted some nine portraits of the Marquise of Pompadour in a variety of settings and attitudes. The portrait of Madame Bergeret relates to several of these in different ways.

This painting probably represents the wife of the artist. It is well-known that in some of his paintings Boucher gracefully transmuted his childishly pretty wife into goddess or nymph, but he also painted an almost satirically pointed portrait of a woman who is probably she, as she and her untidy ambient really were.

Although Boucher served the rococo movement well, it was essentially through the exercise of concious fancy rather than any profoundly imaginative impulse. He was capable of painting straightforward genre scenes and portraits soberly realistic. All his portraits of Madame de Pompadour are characterized by equal directness and emphasis upon spontaneity. He placed her reading, reclining, seizing a hat before going for a walk, and not only in natural poses but in a natural, half-rural setting. Simply dressed and well equipped with books, she pauses in her reading to listen to a bird singing, in a wonderful woodland of velvet moss and silken foliage. This is a portrait artificial only in the way that Watteau and Gainsborough were artificial. It is utterly simple in concept, even anti-rococo, when compared with the high court portraiture of Nattier.

Fran�ois Boucher was already an established painter when Madame de Pompadour made him her favourite artist. But it was not until 1765 that he was appointed “Premier peintre du roi”, at a time when he was already out of fashion and the subject of vehement criticism.

In this pen and ink study for the Allegory of Music, Boucher employed an oval format, although it is unlikely that the painting itself was oval.

Pan in Greek mythology is the god of woods and fields, flocks and herds. In Renaissance allegory he personifies Lust; he charmed the nymphs with the music of his pipes. The story of Pan and Syrinx is described by Ovid (Metamorphoses 1:689-713). Pan was pursuing a nymph of Arcadia named Syrinx when they reached the River Ladon which blocked her escape. To avoid the god’s clutches she prayed to be transformed, and Pan unexpectedly found himself holding an armful of tall reeds. The sound of the wind blowing through them so pleased him that he cut some and made a set of pipes which are named after the nymph.

The picture shows a pastoral landscape with washerwomen and a couple on a river bank. This pastoral scene reflects all the charm of Fran�ois Boucher’s work. It reveals aptly the gentle blending between observation of reality and idealization.

In Boucher’s ingenuous pastoral scenes, the desire to please enchants us, just as it did Diderot and his contemporaries, with its pure aestheticism.

At the end of his career, Boucher devoted himself almost entirely to depicting pastoral scenes, such as the present signed and dated canvas.

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson (1721-1764) became marquise de Pompadour and maitresse en titre to Louis XV in 1745. Her lavish patronage of the arts, in particular of the S�vres porcelain factory and of Boucher, sustained the French Rococo style. Behind her in this portrait stands the sculpture of Love and Friendship which she had commissioned from Pigalle to symbolize her later, platonic relationship with the King.

The painting was commissioned from the artist in 1758 for the Bellevue Castle.

All his portraits of Madame de Pompadour are characterized by directness and emphasis upon spontaneity. He placed her reading, reclining, and well equipped with books. She pauses in her reading.

The subject was inspired by the 16th-century epic poem ‘Gerusalemme Liberata’ (Jerusalem Delivered) by Torquato Tasso (1544-95). Rinaldo and Armida are a pair of lovers in the poem which is an idealized account of the first Crusade which ended with the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 and the establishment of a Christian kingdom. Armida, a beautiful virgin witch, had been sent by Satan (whose aid the Saracens had enlisted0 to bring about the Crusaders’ undoing by sorcery. She sought revenge on the Christian prince Rinaldo after he had rescued his companions whom she had changed into monsters. The pastoral story of hate turned of love, of the lovers’ dalliance in Armida’s magic kingdom, and Rinaldo’s final desertion of her, forms a sequence of themes that were widely popular with Italian and French artists in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The artist was admitted to the Academy by presenting this painting.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Two arias, Rinaldo, Acts II and III

This study was drawn from a live model in the studio for working out the pose of Venus in The Bath of Venus.

This compositional sketch shows the care Boucher took in working out his design before beginning to paint. The drawing demonstrates that Boucher at first contemplated a more vertical format with the top and bottom shaped as scallops.

A diagonal light casts strong shadows on the intimate urban scene in a richly decorated room. It is supposed that the figures represent the artist’s family.

This canvas was painted for Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour (1721-1764), mistress of Louis XV. It was installed in the bathroom in the Château de Bellevue, outside Paris. Its more well known companion piece The Toilet of Venus is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The two paintings are among Boucher’s most poetic and graceful images of one of his favourite subjects.

The focus of the composition of the Bath of Venus is the youthful and beautiful Venus, the soft contours of her figure highlighted against the rich greens and blues of the background. A fine study in red and white chalks, drawn from a live model in the studio, demonstrates the care Boucher took in working out the pose. The youthful goddess is one in a long line of Boucher’s female nudes. Although Boucher made life studies for each of these figures, their ultimate source is one of the most ravishing of all Rococo nudes, The Bather, painted by Boucher’s teacher, Fran�ois Lemoyne, exhibited at the Salon of 1725.

The Birth of Venus is the quintessence of Boucher’s aims, blending the natural and the artificial to make a completely enchanted scene, exuberant and yet relaxed, an aquatic frolic and yet also an air-borne, sea-borne, vision which has authentic pagan feeling. It is a glimpse to make anyone less forlorn as these creatures rise dripping from the waves. The green water itself becomes an exciting erotic element as it swells and falls, bearing up the pearl-pale bodies that abandon themselves to it and offer their limbs like branches of white coral as perches for Venus’s doves. In place of Tiepolo’s romantic nobility there is a human simplicity. Despite the snorting dolphins and having Tritons, the tumbling putti and the tremendous twist of silver and salmon-pink striped awning, the goddess remains a ravishingly pretty., demure girl, half-shy of the commotion of which she is the centre. She, like the nymphs around her, is reality idealized, divinely blonde and slender, touched with a voluptuous vacancy, a lack of animation, which perhaps only increase her charm. The insolent consciousness of Tiepolo’s people is replaced here by innocence bordering on stupidity; herself so desirable, the goddess seems without desires. Boucher keeps much closer than Tiepolo to the terms of ordinary experience; his idealizing touches are restricted to the refining of ankles and wrists, perfecting of the arc of the eyebrows, tinting a deeper red the lips and nipples. Both artists can be related to the sculpture of their period. Boucher belongs with the naturalistic nude statuettes of Falconet and Clodion; Tiepolo has much more in common with the extremes of gilded and rouged Bavarian rococo sculpture.

In this painting Boucher presents the mythological family where mother Venus and father Mercury are captured in a moment of parental responsibility. As Messenger of the Arts, Mercury seems to be instructing his offspring in lessons of love, catching Venus’s eye in a moment of romantic encounter. The love goddess is shown in a typically Boucheresque “bottoms-up” pose.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Francesco Gasparini: The Meddlesome Cupid, aria

Boucher’s pastorals and landscape paintings, which are certainly part of his rococo achievement, are willfully artificial on a basis of real observation. They create a new branch of rococo art in which the growing tendency to shake off dynastic and mythological duties has been completely developed; they are stage settings without characters, or with at most some actor-peasants, in which nature is dressed alluringly as Venus had been undressed.

Perhaps Boucher’s most enchanted landscapes are those where the stage is set but the characters hardly appear: a rural dream of tranquil nature where man has added only picturesque water wheels, some cottages and a few inevitable doves, and where the taffeta grass, the blue trees, and the pale stretched silk sky create an ingenious, impossible Arcadia more beautiful than any reality. By the mid-1750s Gainsborough in England was achieving similar effects, blending French elegance with native facts and producing idyllic landscapes, often with courting woodcutters and milkmaids.

In this painting a young shepherdess has dozed off and is about to be awakened by a young swain, who sneaks up from behind and tickles her face with a bit of straw. The setting is rich and fertile, enlivened by sheep and a dog; vies from the distance balance the composition.

This painting is the pendant to the Love Letter (National Gallery of Art, Washington), another pastoral subject matching in size, composition and amorous theme.

This painting is also referred to as The Two Confidantes, The Messenger, The Lovers’ Secret Mail. It typifies the pastoral idiom Boucher had already made his own by the late 1740s. He never concerned himself with the verities of country life, but employed the shepherdess type as an idealized protagonist for his decorative pictures. In this example he lavished his brush on the women’s satin dresses, their powdery skin, and the casual perfection at their hair.

The painting is the pendant to the Interrupted Sleep (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), another pastoral subject matching in size, composition and amorous theme. The paintings were produced for Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. They were described as overdoors for Pompadour’s residence at Bellevue outside Paris.

On his return from Rome, Boucher painted imaginary views of the Italian countryside. Later he turned to the melancholy, picturesque beauty of the French countryside; on several occasions he took the mill of Quiquengrone at Charenton for his model.

The painting represents a real landscape, although it cannot be confirmed that the location is Charenton.

The painting, commissioned by Count Tessin, the ambassador of Switzerland, is part of a series of four representing morning, noon, afternoon and night, respectively.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Edvard Grieg: Peter Gynt Suite No 1, Op, 46 (‘Morning Mood’)

Diderot bitterly attacked Boucher. All Diderot’s fury about falseness, lack of observation of nature, corruption of morals, loses its relevance before the finest products of Boucher’s art. His mythological world was more frankly feminine, and more accessible, than Tiepolo’s; it hardly tries to astonish the spectator, and its magic is no exciting spell but a slow beguilement of the senses, a lulling tempo by which it is always afternoon in the gardens of Armida. There is no clash of love and duty, no public audience, and with barely the presence of men (Boucher increasingly could hardly be bothered to delineate them at all). But this does not automatically mean frivolity. Especially in the years up to and about 1750, Boucher’s own artistic and actual vigour combined to produce a whole range of mythological pictures which were decorative, superbly competent, and tinged with their own vein of poetry.

The painting was painted for the avocat Fran�ois Derbais who owned at least eight large Bouchers by 1735.

The companion piece The Setting of the Sun is also in the Wallace Collection.

These extravagant and wonderful pictures show Apollo as God of the Sun leaving Tethys with her Nereids and Tritons in the river Ocean as he drives up the morning sun in his chariot drawn by four white horses, and then returning to her at nightfall. Boucher counted these amongst his most successful pictures.

The companion piece The Rising of the Sun is also in the Wallace Collection.

These extravagant and wonderful pictures show Apollo as God of the Sun leaving Tethys with her Nereids and Tritons in the river Ocean as he drives up the morning sun in his chariot drawn by four white horses, and then returning to her at nightfall. Boucher counted these amongst his most successful pictures.

This depiction of Venus at rest was painted for the Marquise de Pompadour, the official mistress of King Louis XV, who was Boucher’s most significant patron. The subject was treated several times by the painter, but the present version is the only example in a vertical format.

No French painter of the 18th century was more inextricably linked to court patronage than Fran�ois Boucher. This picture was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour as part of the decoration for her cabinet de toilette at the Château de Bellevue, one of the residences she shared with Louis XV. The cupids and the doves are attributes of Venus as goddess of Love. The flowers allude to her role as patroness of gardens and the pearls to her mysterious birth from the sea. As a painter of nudes Boucher ranks with Rubens in the 17th century and Renoir in the 19th; among his contemporaries he had no equal.

The toilet of Venus is a timeless theme of sensuous seduction. You can view other depictions of Venus at Her Toilet in the Web Gallery of Art.

The Toilette formed part of a set of paintings on the various times of day. The present painting, set in a crowded room, shows a lady dressing in the morning with her maid.

This painting, together with its pair, the Triumph of Venus, also in the Hermitage, was part of an interior decoration ensemble.

This painting, together with its pair, the Toilet of Venus, also in the Hermitage, was part of an interior decoration ensemble.

In the Aeneid (8:370-385) Virgil tells how Venus asked Vulcan to make a set of armour for Aeneas, her son, when he was about to go to war in Latium. The outcome of Aeneas’ victory was the founding of a Trojan settlement on the Tiber from which, according to the legend, the Romans descended.

This is an early version of the subject often treated by Boucher.

You can view other representations of Venus and Vulcan in the Web Gallery of Art.

In Virgil’s epic Aeneid, Venus seduces Vulcan and persuades him to forge weapons for her son Aeneas. Boucher’s painting shows Vulcan offering the goddess a sword; at his feet are two putti playing with a plumed helmet, and behind him are a shield and armour.

This work was a preliminary sketch for a tapestry design - one of a set commissioned from four different artists by the marquis de Marigny, an influential arts administrator under King Louis XV.

This subject was often treated by Boucher, and the Louvre has three other versions. The delightful and decorative design, full of light and charm, was woven for the series of tapestries The Loves of the Gods, and typifies the spirit of Rococo decoration.

You can view other representations of Venus and Vulcan in the Web Gallery of Art.

The painting, comissioned by Marquise de Pompadour for one of her residences, is part of a series of four representing the four seasons.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 11 minutes):

Vivaldi: Concerto in F minor RV 297 op. 8 No. 4 (Winter)