Each François Boucher oil painting is hand-painted with oil on linen canvas, created by one of HandmadePiece's professional painters. Museum quality with preview before shipment. Global free shipping.
1703 - 1770 • French • Painter • Rococo
"Boucher was earning 50,000 livres per year for his steady output of loves of the gods, amorous shepherds, and fantasy landscapes. (By comparison, an average comfortable bourgeois, living on revenues from bonds or real estate, earned 3,000-4,000 livres; the salary of a professor at the Sorbonne was about I,900.)" - Thomas Crow, 1985
As a youth, Boucher worked on ENGRAVINGS for the Recueil Julienne, a compilation of WATTEAU's work assembled after Watteau died. Watteau had been an independent, private painter, but as his artistic heir, Boucher became court painter to Mme. de Pompadour (who commissioned from him at least eight portraits of her) and head of the French Academy in 1765. Boucher's masterpiece, the tapestry CARTOONS for The Rising of the Sun (he also painted The Setting of the Sun; both 1753), may symbolize the stable and enduring relationship of Louis XV with Pompadour, his lover. The subject is the god Apollo leaving Thetis at dawn to begin the day's labors. At dusk, Apollo returns to Thetis. In Boucher's hands the insinuated eroticism of Watteau's ARCADIAN outings become outspoken in the form of pink and plump nudes and cupids. Boucher's paintings were primarily decorative, graceful allegories filled with nymphs, shepherds, and goddesses in lush garden settings. DIDEROT, the great ENLIGHTENMENT intellectual, was disappointed with the painter he had earlier thought so promising. In 1765, the same year the artist became director of the academy, Diderot wrote about Boucher, "Depravity of morals has been followed step by step by the debasement of taste and the decline in color and composition as well as in the character and then expression, and finally by the deterioration of draftsmanship." Nevertheless, Boucher had great financial success, as described in the quotation above.