BOUCHER AND HIGH COURT ROCOCO
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
New London, CT 06320
(This essay was written in 1195 and revised with a new section on the pastoral child in 2007.)
After a period in Italy where he studied Tiepelo and Albani (1727-31), the young Boucher returned to France. By 1740, he was one of the leading artists of the day with royal commissions beginning as early as 1735. By 1737, he was a Full Professor in the Royal Academy of Art with an annual stipend from the crown in 1742 (almost tripled in 1752). After being hired to teach engraving to Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour, in 175X, Boucher's career took off. At least some of his later good fortune came from his friendship with Madame de Pompadour who remained a close confidante of Louis XV until her death in 1764.
Though she had considerable influence in French politics, Madame de Pompadour's greatest power was over French art, theater, and music between 1750-1764. And Boucher was her favorite painter. He was eventually named "peintre du roi" in 1765, director of the royal tapestry factory at Gobelin, and director of the Royal Academy of Art. On a more unofficial level, Boucher exercised great sway over the royal ceramic factories at Scèvres and elsewhere which reproduced hundreds of his images. Well before Boucher's appointment as painter to the king, the Rococo style born in aristocratic retreat from power occupied the very center of power at Versailles and had been transformed into a state style.
Boucher's great influence stemmed from at least three factors: the considerable power he came to enjoy within France's absolutist art world, his extraordinary artistic talent, and his diligent work habits which produced a thousand paintings. With Madame de Pompadour's support, he became a kind of artistic monarch in his own right, his influence spreading out widely into European painting, prints, textiles, ceramics, and other decorative arts even though he rarely painted for foreign patrons or traveled outside France.
Indeed, Boucher exercised more influence over Western art than anyone before or after except David. It was Boucher's version of Rococo which became a truly international style (though contemporary Italian artists were also important including Ricci, Pellegrini, Tiepolo, and Batoni). Ironically, while Watteau deserves credit for beginning the Rococo aesthetic in France, his works were most widely known through the many reproductive prints of Boucher. Watteau himself worked for a smaller number of noble and high burgher patrons and never achieved the high court patronage, official honors, and tremendous output of the prodigious Boucher. At his peak, Boucher earned the unprecedented sum of 50,000 livres a year. In comparison, a comfortable bourgeois income at that time was 4,000 livres and a professor's salary, 1,500. Boucher's portraits of the king's mistresses fetched up to 48,000 livres each.
Boucher's Rococo
Though Boucher painted a wide range of subjects, including rustic kitchens where beautiful, young peasants dallied, he specialized in erotic mythology and pastoral based on life studies. Even as he drew extensively on Watteau, Boucher developed a distinct Rococo manner all his own. In terms of style, Boucher's mature paintings showed a cooler palette, a more polished, smoothly blended brushwork (giving many of his figures a porcelain-like quality), and a greater sense of an overall decorative formal structure linking his compositions more fully with the larger decorative, ornamental arrangements of Rococo interiors and architectural form.
Thematically, his art was more explicitly erotic from the start when Boucher painted such steamy boudoir mythologies as Hercules and Omphale (ca. 1728-31). Although this and other works tend to sexualize men with the much of the same graceful charm applied to women's bodies and less of the overt display of male power seen in traditional mythological painting, [1] Boucher's art still tended to define the "erotic" as a puppet theater of female bodies manipulated endlessly to enact the fantasies of male courtly beholders.
Though his mythologies have their share of naked, frolicking, innocent young men, they give far greater attention to young, stripped female bodies who are objectified, passive, child-like, without consciousness, and physically powerless even amidst subjects where they ostensibly rule as powerful erotic goddesses (Venus, Diana, etc). By reducing female power to the traditional, sexist theme of a supposed erotic influence over men, Boucher confined their influence to the boudoir where it could be safely separated from any significant public sphere of policy and government and where misogyny could masquerade as worship. In this sense, Boucher's art parallels contemporary French political, economic, and religious institutions which tried to keep educated, high-class, potentially powerful women from any access to real power and to reduce their sphere of influence to private matters of artistic taste, patronage and decoration, music, gardening, theater, opera, fashion, and new literary forms. [2]
Boucher's Pastoral
Pastoral was not a big category in French art until the 1840s when Pater, Lancret, and especially Boucher made it so. It was more common in French literature and theatre and in seventeenth century Dutch and Italian art. In the mid-eighteenth century, French theatre began showing peasants in rustic clothing, not fancy silk dresses with hoops and gloved arms and jewels as had been the custom. Boucher's mature peasants were part of the new natural look, especially a theatrical look. (His earlier peasants were more "natural" like those in Dutch and Flemish Baroque.) In this sense, they responded to Rousseau, even if this art was, from Rousseau's perspective, antithetical to his notions of nature.
For Boucher's audiences, the new pastoral (and new naturalism) erased the more explicit signs of social hierarchy and artifice from the image even while the exquisite brushwork, color, flowing composition, and white, porcelain bodies, untroubled nature, and endless leisure offered the requisite highly artificial world required for the refined sensibilities of courtly audiences. As one observer noted in 1770,
"he only painted nature under its beautiful aspects, that he never portrayed it as anything but cheerful and agreeable ... if he sometimes diverted himself with bambochades, [lowly peasants] he knew how to improve without distorting them, and never presented hideous or disgusting objects, because he knew that our eyes find repugnant what we cannot bring our hands to touch". [3]
While rooted in pastoral tradition, Boucher' went considerably further in eroticizing the natural world giving all of nature with the sensual curves and light colors of the Rococo. This erotic quality celebrated an elemental nature shared ostensibly by nobles and shepherds and at the same time signaled a uniquely courtly leisure of erotic play. Like contemporary pornographic novels such as Le Portier de Chartreux, Boucher's world was dominated by an untroubled eroticism which eliminated all social consciousness and strife. In its freedom from all manner of pressing social problems, Boucher’s Rococo shows, perhaps, an anxious looking away into a timeless, “natural” world free from modern conflicts and disturbing changes. And in its imagery of women as innocent, young, compliant shepherdesses and nymphs, we sense male anxieties about changing ideas about gender and the emergence of modern feminism, rooted in the Enlightenment ideas.
Boucher’s Pastoral as Enlightenment Nature and Child-like Innocence
The dominance of pastoral in the art of Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard is the culmination of the steady ascent of pastoral in court culture from the beginning of the sixteenth century (Bellini, Giorgione, Titian) up to the French Revolution in 1789. In part, Boucher art continued and extended certain traditional aspects of courtly pastoral, especially its refined leisure, courtly love, and amorous delight in idyllic settings. Leaving behind the polite conversation and masquerading unreality of Watteau, Boucher developed a simpler, amorous pastoral both for his many decorous pastorals where clothed shepherds and shepherdesses play games and woo and his many erotic, mythological pastorals where naked figures intertwine. (I will use the phrase “decorous pastorals” to refer to the first group of Boucher’s pastorals, which are very different from his erotic pastoral mythologies.)
Two related features of the Enlightenment shed light on the new prevalence of pastoral in eighteenth-century French art. The first feature is the Enlightenment focus on “nature” as a new standard for reason, politics, morality, social behavior, language, fashion, gardening (now organic and irregular instead of geometric) architecture, and art itself. In this more secular world, nature, not religion, is the touchstone for all values. Nature and human nature were also seen as fundamentally rational and good. In this way, “nature” became a weapon used to discredit traditional ideas as false, “superstitious,” or “unnatural”. For example, the old idea that human nature was sinful gave way to the new faith in human goodness.
With the elevation of reason, human beings now claimed for themselves the power to comprehend nature and even to master it through the new natural science and the growing world of technological innovation. God’s creation slowly lost much of its sanctity and mystery, still found in seventeenth-century landscape art, and became a marvelous machine, an ingeniously engineered clock, to use one of the favorite Enlightenment metaphors.
In the political sphere, Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed that all human beings enjoy “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them” and “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. Despite the hostility of these new ideas toward traditional courtly ideas of nature as hierarchy, many educated aristocrats eagerly took up Enlightenment values, in part because they were fashionable, in part because they signaled a refreshingly progressive modernity. In the later eighteenth century, such ideas produced political and social upheavals including the birth of two democracies, the movement to abolish slavery and the struggle for woman’s rights. Even though Watteau, Boucher, and, to a lesser extent, Fragonard, all portrayed a decidedly courtly nature, with a growing libertine aspect, the dominance of pastoral as an overarching subject in Rococo art was impossible without this larger culture of nature in Enlightenment thinking.
It is when we look at Boucher’s pastorals of decorously clothed shepherds and shepherdesses that we can see more clearly how Enlightenment nature appeared more directly in at least one major group of his paintings, this despite their courtly qualities. For one of the most striking and innovative features of these pastorals is the youthful innocence of Boucher’s peasants. Seen as teenagers, with delicate, pure, milk-white porcelain bodies and tiny feet unmarred by dirt, these sweet, angelic faces give form to the new Enlightenment idea of the child, especially the rustic child, as an innocent creature unspoiled by modern civilization. In Enlightenment thinking, the child was inseparable from ideas of a pure, unspoiled nature. Thus the most perfect child was the pastoral or rustic child, uncontaminated by modern urban vices and habits.
First developed as an important subject in Dutch burgher art of the seventeenth century, [4] the child spread across European art in the eighteenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was a major theme in the art of bourgeois painters like Greuze and Chardin and court artists like Boucher, and artists who worked for both groups like Fragonard. Boucher painted many small, decorative paintings of children doing adult activities like painting and sculpting, harvesting, and fishing. Although indebted to a classical sculptural tradition where cupids did all sorts of adult activities from hunting to chariot racing, this classical imagery had little impact until the eighteenth century when the new interest in the child generated a wide array of similar images.
The sentimental imagery of children emerged much more prominently in the generation immediately following Boucher, after 1770, as Enlightenment values turned away from a more impersonal, scientific reason to a more sentimental world of feeling and family. The best example in French art came in the family genre paintings of Fragonard where children were usually located in idyllic pastoral settings to underscore their deeper ties to a perfect Nature and a perfect natural order. The exemplary perfection of the child was also a major theme in later eighteenth-century literature as seen in Rousseau or Goethe whose Werther delights in playing with village children and even insists that they are the perfect example for adult happiness: “these children, who are our equals, whom we ought to consider as our models”. [5] In describing how he sketches two children under the trees in a perfect, pastoral setting outside a village, Werther moves quickly to the laws of nature, construed now in late Enlightenment terms, and to the highest forms of art, now grounded in this nature.
The chief charm of this spot consists in two linden-trees, spreading their enormous branches over the little green before the church, which is entirely surrounded by peasants' cottages, barns, and homesteads. I have seldom seen a place so retired and peaceable; and there often have my table and chair brought out from the little inn, and drink my coffee there, and read my Homer. Accident brought me to the spot one fine afternoon, and I found it perfectly deserted. Everybody was in the fields except a little boy about four years of age, who was sitting on the ground, and held between his knees a child about six months old: he pressed it to his bosom with both arms, which thus formed a sort of arm-chair; and, notwithstanding the liveliness which sparkled in its black eyes, it remained perfectly still.
The sight charmed me. I sat down upon a plough opposite, and sketched with great delight this little picture of brotherly tenderness. I added the neighboring hedge, the barn-door, and some broken cart-wheels, just as they happened to lie; and I found in about an hour that I had made a very correct and interesting drawing, without putting in the slightest thing of my own. This confirmed me in my resolution of adhering, for the future, entirely to nature. She alone is inexhaustible, and capable of forming the greatest masters. Much may be alleged in favor of rules, as much may be likewise advanced in favor of the laws of society: an artist formed upon them will never produce anything absolutely bad or disgusting; as a man who observes the laws, and obeys decorum, can never be an absolutely intolerable neighbor, nor a decided villain: but yet, say what you will of rules, they destroy the genuine feeling of nature, as well as its true expression.