PLATE V.—PASTORALE
(In the Louvre)
This Pastoral, known as “The Shepherd and Shepherdesses,” is another canvas painted at the height of Boucher’s career, in which dandified shepherds and shepherdesses seem to have stepped out of the Opera in order to play their light comedy of beribboned simple living in a pleasant landscape of France. It was of these pastorals a waggish critic complained that the shepherds and shepherdesses look as if they must soon be off to the Opera again. But what the carpers omitted was to praise the painting of the pleasant lands of France in which these dainty comedies were set. Boucher has never received his meed of honour as one of the finest landscape-painters of eighteenth-century France.
Life is now one long triumph for Boucher, only disturbed in this year by the sad news of the suicide of his old master, Lemoyne. It was in this, Boucher’s thirty-fourth year, that the Salon was opened for the first time since Boucher’s infancy, and he contributed several canvases to it.
Rigaud, the old Academician, now close upon eighty, straggling through the great galleries, might well blink and gasp at the change that had come over French art since he last exhibited there, thirty-three years gone by; but his scoffs and regrets held no terrors for the younger Academicians gathered about. He stood in a new world. A new generation was in possession. The grand manner, the severe etiquette, formal mock-heroics, and solemn pomposity of Louis the Fourteenth were vanished, and the Agreeable and the Pleasant Make-Believe of Louis the Fifteenth reigned in their stead. Old Rigaud might blink indeed! Just as the imposing and stilted etiquette of the reception-room had given place to the easy manners and airy etiquette of the dainty boudoir, so had light chatter and gay wit and the quick repartee usurped the heavy splendours of a consequential age. France, weary of an eternal pose of the grand manner, was seeking change in joyousness and amusement. Gallantry and gaiety were become the object of the ambition of a dandified and elegant day. France became a coquette; dressed herself as a porcelain shepherdess; and with beribboned crook and sheep, seeking pleasant prospects to stroll through, gave herself to dalliance—her powder-puff and patch-box and fan a serious part of her unseriousness.
[V]
THE CHÂTEAUROUX
At thirty-five Boucher has arrived. He is in the vogue; in favour at Court—as well as in the fashion. In his three years from taking his seat at the Academy to the opening of the first Salon he has created a new and original style—his cupid pieces, his pastorals, his Venus-pieces, his tapestry. Boucher’s kingdom lay in the realm of the decorative painter—and he has found it. Torn from the surroundings for which he designed them, as part and parcel of the general scheme, his pictures are as out of place as an Italian altarpiece in an English dining-room, yet they suffer less. Several may still be seen, as he set them up in frames of his own planning, as overdoors in the palace of the Soubise, now given up to the national archives.
The ghost of the Prince of Soubise, who commissioned them, may haunt his palace, but his kin know the place no longer. The overdoors wrought by Boucher’s skill look down now on the nation’s collection of historic documents. The “Three Graces enchaining Love,” the fine pastoral of “The Cage,” and the pastoral of the “Shepherd placing a Rose in his Shepherdess’s Hair,” were to see a mightier change than the usurpation of Louis the Fourteenth’s pompous age by the elegant years of Louis the Fifteenth. But this was not as yet. Here at least we see Boucher’s art rid of all outside influences, and at the full tide of creation; here we have the inimitable lightness of touch, the figures and landscape bathed in the airy volume of atmosphere.
He seems at this time to have played with pastel, due probably to his friendship with Latour, who sent a portrait of Boucher’s wife to this Salon. Boucher showed in the use of chalks the artistry and skill that were always at his command.
He also was putting to its full use his innate sense of landscape, raising to high achievement that astonishing balance of landscape and figures in his design—a balance that has never been surpassed; his figures never override his landscape; his landscape never overpowers his figures. His earnest counsels to his pupils and his constant deploring of the lack of the landscape art in France prove the great stress he laid upon it.