by Will Durant
Jean Baptiste Lemoyne rejected classical restraints as sentencing sculpture to death. Why should not marble or bronze, as well as pictorial tempera or oil, express movement, feeling, laughter, joy, and grief—as, indeed, Hellenistic statuary had dared to do? In that spirit Lemoyne designed the tombs of Cardinal Fleury and the painter Pierre Mignard for the Church of St.-Roch. So, in the Montesquieu that he carved for Bordeaux, he showed the author of The Spirit of Laws as a quizzical, melancholy skeptic, a cross between a Roman senator and a provincial philosopher smiling at Parisian ways. That fleeting smile became almost the identifying signature of the many portrait busts that Lemoyne made, by order of the King, to commemorate divers worthies of France. This lively expressionistic style triumphed over the classicism of Bouchardon and passed down to Pigalle, Pajou, Houdon, and Falconet in one of the great ages of sculpture in France.
IV. PAINTING
The commanding artists were now the painters, and the dominance of Boucher reflected again the influence of women on the arts. The Marquise de Pompadour felt that painters had dallied long enough with Roman heroes, Christian martyrs, and Greek gods; let them see the loveliness of living women in the finery of their costume or the rosiness of their flesh; let them catch in line and color the unprecedented elegance of the age in features, manners, dress, and all the accessories of an affluent minority life. Woman, once a sin, proclaimed herself still a sin, but only to be more tempting; she revenged herself on those frightened centuries in which she had been humiliated by the Church as the mother and agent of damnation, and had been admitted to a eunuch-conceived Paradise only through the virginity of the Mother of God. Nothing could more boldly announce the decline of religion in France than the displacement of the Virgin in French art.
The King, the aristocracy, and the financiers replaced the Church in patronage. In Paris the painters’ Académie de St.-Luc served as a rival and prod to the conservative Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts; and in the provinces additional academies sprang up at Lyons, Nancy, Metz, Marseilles, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Pau, Dijon, and Reims. Besides the annual Prix de Rome a dozen competitions and prizes kept the art world in movement and ferment; and sometimes the King or another patron would console losers by buying their entries or pensioning them for a stay in Italy.
Artists displayed their paintings in the streets; on some religious festivals they pinned them to the hangings that the pious draped from their windows on processional routes. To discourage what seemed to established artists an unseemly procedure, the Académie des Beaux-Arts, after an interruption of thirty-three years, resumed in 1737, in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, the public exhibition of contemporary paintings and sculpture. This annual—or, after 1751, biennial—“Salon” became, in late August and through September, an exciting event in the artistic and social life of Paris, and in the literary world. The war between conservatives in the Academy and rebels in or out of it made art a battle rivaling sex and war in the gossip of the capital; devotees of chaste line and corrective discipline scorned, and were scorned by, protagonists of color, experiment, innovation, liberty. Art criticism became a flourishing enterprise. The Réflexions sur la peinture (1747) of Comte de Caylus were read to a full concourse of the Académie; Grimm reported the exhibitions to the clients of his letters; and Diderot came out of his war on Christianity to emerge as the most controversial art critic of the time. Engravers like Jacques Le Blon and Laurent Cars spread the flutter by disseminating prints of famous works, by illustrating books, and by producing masterpieces of their own. Engraving in color began with Le Blon in 1720.
Never, except in religious art, had artists won so keen a public, or so wide a patronage. Now the painter addressed himself to the world.
1. In the Antechamber
So many painters rose to prominence in this period that merely to mention them would dam our stream. We shall look more carefully at Boucher, Chardin, and La Tour, but there are others who would be shocked to be ignored.
There was the brilliant but lackadaisical Jean Francois de Troy, too handsome to be great; everybody loved him, and he agreed sufficiently to use his own features as those of Christ in The Agony in the Garden.9 He judged it more pleasant to seduce women than to picture them, and left behind him many broken hearts and blemished works.—François (not to be confused with the sculptor Jean Baptiste) Lemoyne decorated the vault of the Salon d’Hercule at Versailles with 142 vast figures, and transmitted to his pupil Boucher the art of replacing the “brown sauce” of Rembrandt with Pompadour rose.—Charles Antoine Coypel, son and grandson of painters, anticipated Chardin in genre; we have met him as painter to the Regent; in 1747 he was premier peintre to Louis XV. Frederick was glad to have his Lady before a Mirror for the Palace of Sanssouci, and the Louvre still displays his Gobelin tapestry of L’Amour et Psyché , a rich assemblage of flesh and drapery.
Jean Marc Nattier was the vogue in portraiture, for he knew how to redeem with pose, color, and the play of light the defects with which birth or life had flawed his sitters; all but one of the ladies he painted were pleased to find themselves, on his canvases, as alluring as they had always believed themselves to be. His Madame de Pompadour hangs in Versailles-lovely tinted hair, and gentle eyes hardly revealing her will to power. Royalty competed for Nattier: he showed Marie Leszczyńska as a modest bourgeoise setting out for a rural holiday,10 and did full justice to the beauty of the Queen’s daughter Adélaïde.11 When Peter the Great came to Paris, Nattier made portraits of him and his Czarina; Peter invited him to move to Russia; Nattier refused; Peter carried off the portraits without bothering to pay.—Jacques André Aved, born in Flanders, brought to Paris some Flemish realism, picturing people as they were; the elder Mirabeau must have been alarmed to see himself as Aved saw him,12 but it is one of the great portraits of the century.
To all these gentlemen of the antechamber—even to Boucher and Char-din—Grimm and Diderot preferred Carle Vanloo. He came of a long line of pictorial Vanloos, of whom we know nine by name. Born at Nice in 1705, he was taken by his painter brother Jean Baptiste to Rome, where he studied with both the chisel and the brush. At Paris he won the Prix de Rome (1724); he spent another session in Italy, and returned to France. He pleased the Academy, and angered Boucher, by following all the academic rules. As he had never spared time from his art to learn reading or writing, good manners or polite discourse, Pompadour shunned him with a pretty shiver as a “bête à faire peur”—a “frightful beast”;13 nevertheless she commissioned him to paint A Spanish Conversation. For a while he accepted the mood of the time, and pictured women dressed in ideal contours; but he soon sobered down to an exemplary family life, proud of his accomplished wife and fond of his daughter Caroline. In 1753 he shared with Boucher in decorating the gorgeous Salle du Conseil in the Palace of Fontainebleau. He climbed to such affectionate fame that when he appeared in his seat at the Comédie-Française after an almost mortal illness, the entire audience rose and applauded, revealing the close relation of art and letters in that tensely cultural age.
Jean Baptiste Oudry recorded the royal hunts in engravings, paintings, and tapestries. The Queen chose him as her teacher, and marveled to watch him work. Some of his engravings provided excellent guides for tapestry weavers; soon Oudry was appointed director of the royal factory at Beauvais. He found there nothing but chaos and decadence; he reorganized the operations with a firm hand, infected the workers with his enthusiasm, and designed for them a series of tapestries illustrating with delectable animals the fables of La Fontaine. There too he made the cartoon for the dazzling assemblage of women and beasts that hangs in the Louvre as the Diana Portiere. The weavers at Les Gobelins become jealous of these Beauvais successes; they persuaded the King to transfer Oudry to the older factory; and there Oudry wore himself out in a long struggle to have the weavers accept the colors that he prescribed. Meanwhile he contributed, both in Beauvais and in Paris, to train the varied talents of the most distinctive, brilliant, and berated artist of
mid-century France.
2. Boucher: 1703–70
Listen to Diderot contemplating Boucher’s nudes:
What colors! what variety! what wealth of objects and ideas! This man has all but truth.… The degradation of taste, of color, of composition, of character, of expression, has followed step by step the debasement of morals.… What should this man paint save what he conceives in his imagination? And what can he conceive who spends his life in the company of women of the town? … This man takes the brush only to show me buttocks and breasts. He knows not what grace is.… Delicacy, honesty, innocence, and simplicity have become strangers to him. He has never seen nature for an instant; at least not the nature which interests my soul, yours, that of any wellborn child, that of any woman who has feeling. He is without taste.… And it is at that moment, forsooth, that he is made first painter to the King [1765].14
Boucher presumably never saw this critique, since it was directed to Grimm’s foreign clientele. Let us look at him without malice aforethought.
He was a child of Paris, of its code and ways. His father was a designer who kept an art shop near the Louvre, and taught François the rudiments of painting and sculpture. As the boy showed a facile talent, he was apprenticed to the engraver Laurent Cars, then to the painter François Lemoyne. Being engaged to paint scenery for the Opéra, he fell in with a succession of actresses and chorus girls; he imitated, so far as his means allowed, all the dissipations of the Regency.15 Once, he tells us, he experienced an idyllic love for a pretty fruitière, Rosette; she seemed to him simplicity and purity incarnate; he took her as model for a Madonna into which he poured all that remained of his boyhood piety. But while this work was still unfinished he relapsed into promiscuity. When he tried to finish it his inspiration had vanished, and Rosette too. He never recaptured that moment of tender imagination.16
His skill developed rapidly under the tutelage of Lemoyne. In that atelier he learned something of Correggio’s flair for feminine figures of classic features and supple grace. At the Luxembourg Palace he studied the resplendent canvases in which Rubens had turned the life of Marie de Médicis into an epic of color and noblesses de robes. In 1723, aged twenty, he won the Prix de Rome, entitling him to three years’ board and lodging in Paris, a pension of three hundred livres, and four years in Rome. We get a picture of student life in the Paris of the Regency when we are told that his companions carried the victor on their shoulders around the Place du Louvre.
In 1727 he accompanied Carle Vanloo to Italy. The director of the Académie Royale de France in Rome reported that he had found for “a young man named Boucher … a little hole of a room, and I have packed him in there. I am afraid it is really no more than a hole, but at least he will be under cover.”17 The “modest youth,” as the director described him, did not always have to sleep there, for he found many beds open to him in Rome. It is significant of changing taste that he showed no liking for the work of Raphael or Michelangelo, but struck up a friendship with Tiepolo.
Returning to Paris (1731), he continued to burn the candle at both ends. He was seldom content with any but a firsthand knowledge of his models. Nevertheless he found time to paint some outstanding pictures—e.g., L’Enlèvement d’Europe (The Rape of Europa), one of his countless expositions of the female form. In 1733 he thought he had discovered Venus herself in his model Jeanne Buseaux, and, though he felt that “marriage is scarcely in my line,”18 he took her as his wife. He was briefly faithful to her, and she repaid him in kind. Probably she posed for his painting Renaud et Armide, 19 which won him full membership in the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1734). Louis XV now commissioned him to paint cheerful scenes in the bedroom of the still loved Queen. With the reopening of the Salon in 1737 his work found wider fame and patronage; thereafter he knew no poverty, and soon no rival.
His specialty was nudes. Until his marriage he had seldom lingered long enough with one woman to discover much more of her than her skin; but he had found that surface endlessly interesting, and seemed resolved to portray it in every nook and cranny, every form and pose, from hair of blond silk to feet that never knew a shoe. Boucher was rococo in the flesh.
But he was more than that. Though later critics condemned his art as technically defective, he was actually a master craftsman in composition, color, and line; however he sometimes scrimped his art in hurry for a fee. Many contemporaries acclaimed the fresh plein-air spirit of his pictures, the fertility of his imagination, the easy grace of his line; and the hostile Diderot thought that “no one understands as Boucher does the art of light and shade.”20 Hardly any branch of painting eluded his skill. Those of us who know only some of his paintings and tapestries are surprised to learn that “the popularity of Boucher was due as much to his drawings as to his paintings.”21 His drawings became precious items in his lifetime; illustrious collectors competed for them; they were bought like easel pictures, and were hung on bedroom or boudoir walls. They were marvels of economy—a dimple made with a dot, a smile dashed off with a line, and all the sheen and rustle of silken skirts emerging miraculously from a bit of chalk.
Surely not for the pelf involved, but because of the genius and imagination swelling in him, lighting his eyes, driving his hands, Boucher worked ten hours a day in his studio, leaving his mark on almost everything that he touched. Besides a thousand pictures, he painted fans, ostrich eggs, pottery, medallions, screens, furniture, carriages, stage scenery, the walls and ceiling of a theater; all alert Paris came to see the décor he provided as background for Noverre’s ballet Les Fêtes chinoises (1754). He had only a minor interest in landscapes, being Aphrodite’s ambassador to the Louvre; yet he enshrined his human forms in woods and fields, by sparkling waters or shady ruins, under white clouds in a blue sky, and a warm sun abetting and approving the heat of the blood. One would have thought genre pictures quite uncongenial to him; nevertheless he painted A Family Scene, and—as if to free himself from the thralldom of beauty—he represented farmyards, barns, dovecotes, wheelbarrows, back-yard debris, donkeys ambling under a load of clattering pans. To round out his repertoire he became the greatest tapestry designer of the century.
In 1736 Oudry invited him to Beauvais to design for the weavers there. He began with fourteen drawings of Italian village scenes;22 they proved so successful that they were woven at least a dozen times before his death. He proceeded to a more typical theme, The Story of Psyche—five hangings modeled by Mme. Boucher; these tapestries are among the choice masterpieces of eighteenth-century art. He crowned his work with six tapestries called The Noble Pastoral;23 one of these, The Bird Catchers (La Pipée aux Oiseaux) shows as charming a pair of lovers as ever evolved from silk or wool. Critics have complained that with Oudry and Boucher tapestry became too much like painting, and lost its distinguishing virtues. Louis XV hardly minded, for when Oudry died (1755) he promoted Boucher to head Les Gobelins.
Meanwhile the triumphant artist had won the ardent patronage of Pompadour. For her he decorated the palace of Bellevue, and designed its furniture. For the theater with which she strove to entertain the King he painted the scenery and devised the costumes. He made several portraits of her, so appealing in beauty and grace that all judgment hesitates before them. The charge that Boucher never got beyond the flesh is silenced here; he has made us see not so much the physical charms of the mistress as the qualities of intelligence and tenderness that endeared her to the King, the cultural interest that made her the goddess of the philosophes, and the feminine artistry of dress that daily clothed with new allure the body’s fading charms. Through these portraits, and La Tour’s, she could quietly remind the King of the beauty that was gone and the subtler bewitchments that remained. Perhaps, too, she used Boucher’s sensual pictures to please the royal lust. No wonder she made Boucher her favorite, secured him an apartment in the Louvre, took lessons from him in engraving, discussed with him her plans for decorating her palaces and promoting the arts. For her he painted (1753) two of his greatest pictures, Le Lever
du Soleil (Sunrise) and Le Coucher du Soleil (Sunset)24—in both of which, of course, the sun is outshone by human forms.
He survived Pompadour, survived the disastrous war with England and Frederick, and continued prosperous to the end of his sixty-seven years. Commissions flowed in; he became wealthy, but worked as zealously as ever, and he redeemed his wealth with generosity. He was now a benevolent satyr, untiringly sensual, but ever gay and kind, “obliging and disinterested, … incapable of base jealousies, … immune from any low appetite for money gains.”25 He worked too fast to reach the highest excellence; he indulged his imagination so freely that he lost touch with reality. He told Reynolds that he needed no models, and preferred to paint from memory, but his memory idealized. Uncorrected by reality, he became careless in his drawing and exaggerated in color; he almost invited the harsh criticisms that came upon him in his later years. Grimm, Diderot, and others accused him of mistaking prettiness for beauty, of reducing art from dignity to specious and superficial decoration, and of lowering the moral tone of the time by idealizing physical charms. Diderot denounced his “simperings, affectations, … beauty spots, rouge, gewgaws, … frivolous women, libidinous satyrs, bastard infants of Bacchus and Silenus.”26 Dying at work in his studio, Boucher left unfinished on his easel The Toilette of Venus—as if to defy Diderot. And Diderot, hearing that the artist was dead, had a twitch of remorse. “I have spoken too much evil of Boucher,” he said; “I retract.”27 Let us leave the matter there.
