Drawings Boucher was no less prolific or varied as a draftsman. Drawings played a multitude of roles in the preparation of paintings and as designs for printmakers, as well as being created as finished works of art for the growing market of collectors. For his major canvases, Boucher followed standard studio practices of the time, working out the overall composition and then making chalk studies for individual figures, or groups of figures. Two Winged Putti (60.175.1), for example, is a study for a pair of Boucher's trademark dimpled putti in the foreground of Apollo Revealing His Divinity to Issé (1750, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours). Oil and gouache sketches were also common components of Boucher's working process in the preparation of major commissions, although over the course of his career he increasingly made sketches as independent works. The Adoration of the Shepherds (1997.95), a free and painterly sketch in gouache, was long considered a preparatory sketch for Madame de Pompadour's private altarpiece La lumière du monde (ca. 1750, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon), although recent scholarship suggests it was made at least ten years later, as an autonomous work. This self-referential aspect of Boucher's oeuvre became increasingly pronounced in his later career as he frequently revisited favored themes. Vertumnus and Pomona (60.176.2) dates to the last decade of his career when he began to favor brown chalk, a fabricated medium, and is likewise a recension of a subject which had long fired his imagination, beginning with an etching he made in 1727 after a painting by Watteau of the same subject. Prints, Porcelain, and Tapestry Boucher's impact on the decorative arts of the Rococo period, in France and throughout Europe, is difficult to overstate. Aside from the three dozen or so plates he etched himself (e.g., La Petite Reposée [1998.524]), a great number of printmakers found it lucrative to reproduce his paintings and drawings; some 1,500 prints after Boucher are known today. The porcelain manufactories at Vincennes and Sévres were kept busy with the replication of his gallant shepherds and shepherdesses as soft-paste biscuit porcelain figurines and as polychrome painted decoration for tableware and decorative pieces. In addition, Boucher produced numerous sets of prints which adapted Chinese figures to Rococo taste, fueling the fashion for chinoiserie. Boucher's fertile imagination and unified aesthetic were also well suited to the medium of tapestry, and the manufactory of Beauvais had many commercial successes based on his designs, including the series Fêtes Italiennes (64.145.3), which went into production in 1736. In 1755, he was appointed head of the royal tapestry manufactory at Gobelins, where he continued to collaborate on the design of successful series of tapestries. These included the set produced for Croome Court in the 1760s (58.75.1-22), in which compositions after his designs were set into medallions against a trompe l'oeil damask ground. Boucher's greatest skill as a designer, the ability to subjugate disparate sources to his aesthetic, was also his greatest failing in the eyes of later critics, especially as Neoclassicism supplanted the Rococo in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. More than any other artist, François Boucher (1703–1770) is associated with the formulation of the mature Rococo style and its dissemination throughout Europe. Among the most prolific of his generation, he worked in virtually every medium and every genre, creating a personal idiom that found wide reproduction in print form. He was highly adept at marketing his work, providing designs for all manner of decorative arts, from porcelain to tapestry. Bust of François Boucher François Boucher born in Paris, the son of a lace designer Nicolas Boucher, François Boucher was perhaps the most celebrated decorative artist of the 18th century, with most of his work reflecting the Rococo style. At the young age of 17, Boucher was apprenticed by his father to François Lemoyne, however after only 3 months he went to work for the engraver Jean-François Cars. Within 3 years Boucher had already won the elite Grand Prix de Rome, although he did not take up the consequential opportunity to study in Italy until 4 years later. On his return from studying in Italy in 1731, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture as a historical painter, and became a faculty member in 1734. His career accelerated from this point, as he advanced from professor to Rector of the Academy, becoming head of the Royal Gobelin factory in 1755 and finally Premier Peintre du Roi (First Painter of the King) in 1765. Reflecting inspiration gained from the artists Watteau and Rubens, Boucher's early work celebrates the idyllic and tranquil, portraying nature and landscape with great elan. However, his art typically forgoes traditional rural innocence to portray scenes with a definitive style of eroticism, and his mythological scenes are passionate and amorous rather than traditionally epic. Marquise de Pompadour (mistress of King Louis XV), whose name became synonymous with Rococo art, was a great fan of Boucher's, and it is particularly in his portraits of her that this style is clearly exemplified. The Afternoon Meal 1739 - François Boucher The Afternoon Meal 1739 Paintings such as The Breakfast of 1739, a family scene, also show Boucher as a master of the genre scene, as he regularly used his own wife and family as models. These intimate family scenes are, however, in contrast to the 'licentious' style, as seen in his Odalisque portraits. The dark-haired version of the Odalisque portraits prompted claims by Diderot that Boucher was "prostituting his own wife", and the Blonde Odalisque was a portrait that illustrated the extramarital relationships of the King. Boucher gained lasting notoriety through such private commissions for wealthy collectors and, after the ever-moral Diderot expressed his disapproval, his reputation came under increasing critical attack during the last of his creative years. Along with his painting, Boucher also designed theatre costumes and sets, and the ardent intrigues of the comic operas of Favart (1710-1792) closely parallel his own style of painting. Tapestry design was also an interest and major activity of his, together with his design activities for the opera and the royal palaces of Versailles, Fontainebleau and Choisy. His designs for all of the aforementioned augmented his earlier reputation, resulting in many engravings from his work and even reproduction of his themes onto porcelain and biscuit-ware at the Vincennes and Sevres factories. Blond Odalisque (L'Odalisque Blonde) 1752 - François Boucher Blond Odalisque (L'Odalisque Blonde) 1752 Neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David began his painting instruction under Boucher. Boucher is famous for saying that the natural world was "trop verte et mal eclaire" (too green and badly lit). François Boucher died on May 30, 1770 in Paris, France. His name, along with that of his patron Madame de Pompadour, had become synonymous with the French Rococo style, leading the Goncourt brothers to write: "Boucher is one of those men who represent the taste of a century, who express, personify and embody it." (From Wikipedia) # Four tapestries from the sixth weaving of the "Loves of the Gods" C. 1775 Paris # Basse lisse tapestry, wool and silk, the ground imitating crimson damask ?? # Provenance : Alcove set for the winter "Meuble" (all the textiles for a room : hangings and upholsteries) in the duchesse de Bourbon?s ?Chambre Rose? at the Palais Bourbon; sold during the Revolution (1794); assigned from the Mobilier National, 1901* , 1901 -"Cupid and Psyche" - "Vertumnus and Pomona" -"Venus Emerging from the Waters - "Aurora and Cephalus" $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ Oudry turned to other artists to supplement the tapestry cartoons he was producing; from Charles-Joseph Natoire's designs Beauvais wove the suite of Don Quichotte, and from François Boucher, starting in 1737, a long series of six suites of tapestry hangings, forty-five subjects in all, constituting the familiar "Boucher-Beauvais" suites that embody the rococo style: the Fêtes Italiennes, a set of village festivals in settings evoking the Roman Campagna, the Nobles Pastorales, a further suite of six chinoiseries, now in a lighter, Rococo handling. Boucher's eight oil sketches for these Tentures chinoises were shown in the Salon of 1742;. It was unusual for the artist's sketches to be enlarged to provide cartoons, as in this case;[9] the translation to cartoons was made by Jean-Joseph Dumons de Tulle. The successful series was woven at Beauvais at least ten times between July 1743 and August 1775; in addition further copies were made at Aubusson.[10] La pêche chinoise, 1742, one of Boucher's chinoiserie designs woven at Beauvais (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'archéologie de Besançon) Boucher also designed for Beauvais the Story of Psyche[11] and at the apex of the lot, the Amours des Dieux, the "Loves of the Gods", after paintings by Boucher delivered 1747-49; suites from among the nine subjects, though never all subjects in one suite, were being woven at Beauvais as late as 1774.[12] A new partner, André-Charlemagne Charron, and increased royal support, with annual order for sets of hangings now with complete suites of furniture coverings, to be delivered to the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne or the foreign ministry should have launched new successes for Beauvais, but Oudry's death, 30 April 1755, and Boucher's defection to the Gobelins the same year, initiated a period of stagnation, while the old designs were repeated, and then decline. At the French Revolution the workshops were temporarily closed, following a dispute between the weavers and the administration, and then were reopened, under State direction, making little but upholstery covers.