François Boucher
The court painter of the Rococo.
Boucher was Madame de Pompadour's favourite painter. He painted nude goddesses, shepherdesses and designs for tapestries and porcelain.
François Boucher was born in Paris in 1703. His father was a designer of patterns, among other things for embroidery. Boucher studied briefly with the painter François Lemoyne and as a young man earned his living engraving drawings by Antoine Watteau for a large illustrated publication. In this way he learned the light and elegant idiom of the Rococo. In 1723 he won the Prix de Rome but had to pay for the journey to Italy himself, where he stayed in the late 1720s.
Back in Paris his career advanced quickly. He became a member of the French Academy in 1734 and received commissions from the king and the court. He painted mythological scenes with Venus, Diana and cupids, but also pastoral scenes and small genre pictures. Diana Leaving Her Bath (1742) in the Louvre is one of his best-known works. The Triumph of Venus (1740) was bought by Carl Gustaf Tessin and is now in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, which has one of the world's finest collections of Boucher.
Boucher was a man of many talents. He made designs for tapestries for the factories at Beauvais and later the Gobelins, where he became director in 1755. He designed decoration for the Sèvres porcelain factory, scenery for the opera and book illustrations. His colours are light and sweet: pink skin, pale blue sky, golden draperies and soft clouds. Everything is elegant, playful and sensual, and almost never serious.
Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress and one of the great patrons of culture of her day, was his most important patron. His full-length portrait of her from 1756 is in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. In 1765 he became First Painter to the King and director of the Academy. He was married to Marie-Jeanne Buzeau, who painted herself and often sat as his model. Boucher died in his lodgings in the Louvre in 1770.
Even in his lifetime critics such as Diderot turned against him. They found his art artificial and immoral. After the Revolution he was seen as the symbol of a decadent court. Today he is valued as one of the most skilful artists of the Rococo. His pupil Fragonard carried the style forward.