Essays francais boucher

His wide-ranging production soon graced the walls of an equally wide-ranging clientele, from King Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, and Count Carl Gustav Tessin, Swedish ambassador to Paris, to bourgeois collectors of much more modest means.

In the case of Watteau, like some of the impressionists, his portraiture was very much decorative, verging on the caricature as in the work the English painter and graphic artist William Hogarth (1697-1764). But Hogarth was foremost a social critic and satirist, while the three French artists were commissioned by the court and its circle.

Boucher’s most original contribution to Rococo painting was his reinvention of the pastoral, a form of idealized landscape populated by shepherds and shepherdesses in silk dress, enacting scenes of erotic and sentimental love.

Denis Diderot, whose opinion on Boucher’s merit was decidedly mixed, famously wrote of him in his review of the 1761 Salon, “Cet homme a tout—excepté la vérité” (That man is capable of everything—except the truth). From a humble background, Boucher initially supported himself as a printmaker and designer of book illustrations.