Haldane MacFall

“ Complacent Poisson came home, and took the rich and fashionable, bland and smiling Lenormant de Tournehem to his arms. Has he not wealth and estates? therefore as excellent a friend for Poisson as for Madame Poisson. The girl Jeanne leaves the convent to be taught the accomplishments by the supreme masters of France, the wits foregather at Madame Poisson’s, and the brilliant Jeanne is soon mistress of the arts—coquetry not least of all; has also the most exquisite taste in dress. Under all is a heart cold as steel ”

“ The rosy carnivals and gay gallantries of his age gave way to the blood-stained romance and fierce tempest of the Revolution. The garrets of the old curiosity-shops received the discarded canvases of the master. His shepherds and shepherdesses were put to rout by the Romans of his pupil, citizen David. The old order was brought into contempt and overthrown. And with it, Boucher’s art, like much that was gracious and charming and good in the evil thing, went down also, and was overwhelmed for a while. ”

“ The whole of his life long, Boucher gave himself up with equal and passionate devotion to work and to pleasure—working at his easel often twelve hours of his day without losing, to the end when the brush fell from his dead fingers, his blitheness of heart or his generosity of act, and without weakening the pleasure-loving desires of his gadding spirit. ”

“ Boucher showed in the use of chalks the artistry and skill that were always at his command.
He also was putting to its full use his innate sense of landscape, raising to high achievement that astonishing balance of landscape and figures in his design—a balance that has never been surpassed; his figures never override his landscape; his landscape never overpowers his figures. His earnest counsels to his pupils and his constant deploring of the lack of the landscape art in France prove the great stress he laid upon it. ”

“ She has a certain sense of virtue; indeed openly vows that no one but the king shall ever come between her and her lord. But, deep in her heart, she has harboured a fierce ambition—that the king shall help her to keep her bond. She puts forth all her gifts, all her powers, to win to the strange goal ”

“ The youth Boucher, with the quick and astounding gift, that he displayed all through his life, of rapidly making his own what he wanted to acquire, picked up from Lemoyne at once a French way of stating what he desired to state, in a large, broad manner, without having to go through the long years of drudgery to Italian models of style which was then the only schooling for an artist—was therefore enabled to free himself from the equally long years that it would have taken him to rid the Italian style from his artistry. ”

“ She has but one hindrance to ambition—her mean birth. Lenormant de Tournehem rids her even of this slur by making his nephew, Lenormant d’Etioles, [Pg 57] marry her, giving the young couple half his fortune for dowry, and the promise of the rest when he dies—also he grants him a splendid town-house, as splendid a country seat. And consequential self-respecting little Lenormant d’Etioles is lord of Etioles, amongst other seignories. So Jane Fish appears as Madame Lenormant d’Etioles, seductive, beautiful, accomplished, to whose house repair the new philosophy, the wits, and artists. ”

“ On the death of Carle van Loo, Boucher, at sixty-two, was made first painter to the king, with all his pensions and privileges that were consistent with this the supreme appointment in the art world.
There had been serious intention of making Boucher the head of the Ecole des Elèves Protegés; he had the art of making himself liked and of inspiring the love of the arts. He was very popular with the students and artists, owing to his kindliness, his eagerness to render service, his readiness to encourage the youngsters or to console them. ”

“ At thirty-five Boucher has arrived. He is in the vogue; in favour at Court—as well as in the [Pg 43] fashion. In his three years from taking his seat at the Academy to the opening of the first Salon he has created a new and original style—his cupid pieces, his pastorals, his Venus-pieces, his tapestry. Boucher’s kingdom lay in the realm of the decorative painter—and he has found it. Torn from the surroundings for which he designed them, as part and parcel of the general scheme, his pictures are as out of place as an Italian altarpiece in an English dining-room, yet they suffer less. ”

“ The boy Boucher, at sturdy twelve, would recall the death of the old king in his lonely last years, and the setting upon the ancient throne of France of the five-year-old child as Louis Quinze—a comely little fellow—with Orleans as Regent. Young François Boucher was to spend his youth and grow up to manhood in a France that lay under the regency of this dissolute, brilliant Orleans. ”

“ This Pastoral, known as “The Shepherd and Shepherdesses,” is another canvas painted at the height of Boucher’s career, in which dandified shepherds and shepherdesses seem to have stepped out of the Opera in order to play their light comedy of beribboned simple living in a pleasant landscape of France. It was of these pastorals a waggish critic complained that the shepherds and shepherdesses look as if they must soon be off to the Opera again. But what the carpers omitted was to praise the painting of the pleasant lands of France in which these dainty comedies were set. ”

“ She goes again a month later; in the morning is seized with sudden terror—she daren’t go back to her angry lord lest he do her grievous harm; he will have missed her. The king is touched; allows her to hide from henceforth in the secret apartments; promises the beautiful creature a lodging, her husband’s banishment, and early acknowledgment as titular mistress—before the whole Court at Easter, says the pious Great One. ”

“ No man did more for the advancement of the art of his time. A pension of a thousand livres falling vacant, the young fellow secured it for Boucher; and almost immediately afterwards, a studio becoming vacant at the Louvre owing to the death of Coypel, first painter to the king, Boucher came to his coveted home, eagerly moving in with his family as soon as its wretched state could be put into repair. ”

“ It is impossible to reckon the number of the pastorals and Venus-pieces that his master-hand painted and loved to paint, during these the supreme years of his genius. It is significant that they were painted during the years that saw the Pompadour in supreme power.
Boucher was so firmly established in 1750, his forty-seventh year, that he moved into a new house in the Rue Richelieu, near the Palais Royal. Disappointed in not receiving a studio and apartments at the Louvre, he was allowed to use a studio in the king’s library. ”

“ Watteau had lately died, his eager will burning out the poor stricken body. His friend De Julienne, anxious to publish a book to Watteau’s memory, strolled into the engraving-studio behind “Père Cars’” shop, where Boucher and his comrade, Laurent Cars, were wont to spend a part of their time; and he commissioned Boucher to engrave 125 of the plates after the dead master. Watteau’s essentially French influence was the impulse above all others to thrust forward the development of Boucher’s genius along its right path, and sent his art towards its great goal. ”

“ Boucher painted her handsome being as a shepherdess in one of his pastorals. She was no ordinary toy of a king. A woman of talent, with hot ambitions for the king’s [Pg 48] majesty, fired with the pride of race of the old French noblesse, it was during her short years of ascendancy over the king that he roused from his body’s torpor and made an effort to reach the dignity and eminence befitting to the lord of a great and gallant people. ”

“ Poor unfortunate infants! for whom Philosophy could find no happier joy in life than [Pg 77] stripping hemp! Boucher was but an artist. He painted his generation as far as he could see it, and, with all his faults and weaknesses, he never debauched his art with foreign and alien things that had no part in the nation’s life; he painted fair France into his landscapes, not a make-believe land he did not know with preposterous Greek ruins ”

“ However, the Academicians feared he would be an unorthodox master for youth, and appointed another in his place.
A long and serious illness thwarted his keen energies. Diderot was giving himself up to outrageous violence against him. If the old painter exhibited at the Salon, Diderot fiercely assailed his art; if he did not exhibit, Diderot as bitterly assailed him for his negligences. Above all, he attacked Boucher in that he did not paint what Diderot would have painted—but could not. ”

“ He is more concerned with the accident of the kissing of a kitchen-maid than with the kitchen’s habit. He cannot even peep into a scullery without dragging in Venus by the skirts, and tricking her out in a property-wardrobe of a scullery-wench, in which the girl is clearly but acting the part. ”

“ In this year of 1744 Boucher created a new fashion at the annual Salon by sending studies and sketches instead of finished pictures; and it set a value upon such things not before realised by artists, for success was instant and loud.
Towards the end of the next, Boucher’s forty-second year, the Swedish Ambassador, Count de Tessin, who was to take his leave of Paris, commissioned four pictures to represent the day of a woman of fashion, and to be entitled “Morning,” “Midday,” “Evening,” and “Night.” Boucher painted one of these for him, now known as the “Marchande de Modes.” ”

“ As a matter of fact, the Pompadour has been blamed too much for this evil act, and too much forgotten for her splendid patronage of the man who, under it and during these great years of his forties, produced a series of masterpieces that place him in the foremost [Pg 67] rank of the painters of his century. ”

“ In an official document of the Director of Buildings to the king (or Minister of Fine Art, as we should say) , written in this year of 1745, Boucher being forty-two, is a “list of the best painters,” in which Boucher is singled out for distinction as “an historic painter, living in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré, opposite the Rue des Deux-Ecus, pupil of Lemoyne, excelling also in landscape, grotesques, and ornaments in the manner of Watteau; and equally skilled in painting flowers, fruit, architecture, and subjects of gallantry and of fashion.” ”

“ Boucher accounted his fortune made.
The cheery youth went at his work with energy and enthusiasm, blithely setting his hand to anything that was wanted of him, bringing charm and invention to all he did—tailpieces, frontispieces, emblems, coats of arms, freemason’s certificates, first-communion cards, initial letters. He was soon set to work upon important designs for engravings. He searched [Pg 21] out the publishers of books, and let no chance escape of working for them. ”

“ And these engravings, done by the best gravers of his day, greatly extended his reputation and popularised him; he fully realised the value of the advertisement as well as his profits from it. Before his thirty-third year was run out he published his well-known “Cries of Paris.” Boucher’s description of them, “studies from the low classes,” holds the key to that something of failure to realise the dramatic verities that is over all; it gives also the attitude of the France that he knew towards the France that he did not, and could [Pg 38] not understand. ”