Marriage of Cupid and Psyche
François Boucher, 1744
son of painter
with father, Nicolas Bouché
1723 – won Prix de Rome (funding given to someone else)
1723-28 – engraver’s assistant
1734 – Académie Royale junior member (reçu) based on acceptance of Rinaldo and Armida (1734, Louvre, Paris)
1736 – began working also as tapestry designer
1739 – began working as set designer at opera
1755 – Inspector of Works at Gobelins tapestry factory
1765 – Director of Académie Royale; First Painter to King
-Exhibited regularly at the Salon
Louis XV, Marquise de Pompadour (Boucher painted her portrait eight times)
Triumph of Venus, 1740 (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)
Diana After the Bath, 1742 Salon (Louvre, Paris)
Many of Boucher’s paintings were engraved and sold as prints
John Constable held a low opinion of Boucher:
“But the climax of absurdity to which the art may be carried, when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher. Good temper, suavity, and dissipation characterized the personal habits of this perfect specimen of the French School of the time of Louis XV, or the early part of the last century. His landscape, of which he was evidently fond, is pastoral; and such pastorality! The pastoral of the opera house….Boucher told Sir Joshua Reynolds ‘that he never painted from the life, for that nature put him out.’”
From Constable’s Second Royal Academy lecture (1836); cited in Lorenz Eitner, Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1750-1850, vol. 2: Neoclassicism and Romanticism (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), 66-7.
Hedley, Jo. François Boucher: Seductive Visions. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007
Hyde, Melissa Lee. Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics. Malibu, CA: Getty Publications, 2006
Wakefield, David. Boucher. London: Chaucer Press, 2006