The designing of a frontispiece for the catalogue of a personal friend, one Gersaint, a merchant of oriental wares, started Boucher in his thirty-third year upon that series of Chinese pictures and tapestries known as the “Chinoiseries,” in which he frittered away only too many precious hours, for they were received with great favour by the public. The paintings of Chinese subjects designed for the looms of Beauvais are still to be seen at Besançon.
But busy as were his brain and hand in the exercise of his wide and versatile gifts, pouring out “Chinoiseries,” illustrations for books, tapestries on a large scale, landscapes, models for the gilt bronze decorations of porcelain vases, scheming handsome frames for his pictures, designing furniture and fans—Boucher was true, above all, “to his goddess,” and painted the famed “Birth of Venus,” which, thanks to the Swedish Ambassador’s fondness for Madame Boucher, now hangs at Stockholm; our amorous Count de Tessin, to be just, seems to have had a rare flair for the artistic—besides artist’s wives. It was on the 15th of April in 1742, the last year of his thirties, that the Royal favour was marked by the grant of a pension of 400 livres (double florins) to Boucher with promise of early benefits to follow. Two years afterwards it was raised to 600 livres.
This was the year that he painted the beautiful canvas of “Diana leaving the Bath with one of her Companions,” now at the Louvre. It was also the year that saw his landscape, the “Hamlet of Issé” at the Salon. This “Hameau d’Issé” was to be enlarged for the Opera, proving him to be decorator there, where he was arranging waterfalls, cascades, and the rest of the pretty business, without staying his hand from his art.
At forty Boucher has come into his kingdom. The ten years of these forties were to be a vast triumph for him. He was to produce masterpiece after masterpiece. His art had caught the taste of the day. He was at the height of his powers. He had done great things—he was to do greater. During these ten years of his forties he poured forth vivid and glowing works of sustained power and originality.
We have a picture of him as he was in the flesh at this time—the pastel portrait by Lundberg, now at the Louvre—a gay, somewhat dissipated, handsomely dressed dandy of the time, smiling out of his careless day, the debonnair man of fashion, the laughing eyes showing signs of the night carousals, which were the rest from the prodigious toil of this vital and forthright spirit.
It was in this our artist’s fortieth year that the gifted old Cardinal Fleury, who had guided the fortunes of France with rare skill, died, broken by his ninety years and the blunders of the disastrous war that he had so strenuously opposed; and Louis, essaying the strut of kingship, became king by act. His indolent character, unequal to the mighty business, his indeterminate will fretted by the set of quarrelling and intriguing rogues that he gathered about him as his ministers, he fell into the habit that became his thenceforth, the only thing to which he paid the tribute of constancy—he ruled France from behind pretty petticoats. He had early shown the adulterous blood of his great-grandfather; two, if not three, of five sisters of the noble and historic house of De Nesle had yielded to his gadding fancy; the youngest now ousted her sister De Mailly from the king’s favour, was publicly acknowledged as the king’s mistress, and became Duchess of Châteauroux. Boucher painted her handsome being as a shepherdess in one of his pastorals. She was no ordinary toy of a king. A woman of talent, with hot ambitions for the king’s majesty, fired with the pride of race of the old French noblesse, it was during her short years of ascendancy over the king that he roused from his body’s torpor and made an effort to reach the dignity and eminence befitting to the lord of a great and gallant people. He stepped forth awhile from his drunken bouts and manifold mean adulteries, and set himself at the head of the army in Flanders, and strutted it as conqueror. Poor Châteauroux only got the hate of the people for reward, Louis the honours; for the people resented the public dishonour of her state. Power she found to be a dead-sea apple in her pretty mouth. The glory of it all, the splendours, were not the easily won delights for which she had looked. She had to fight a duel, that never ended, with the king’s witty, crafty, and scurrilous Prime Minister, the notorious Maurepas—and Maurepas willed that no woman should ever come between him and the king—Maurepas who knew no mercy, no decency, no chivalry, no scruple. At Châteauroux’s urging, Louis placed himself at the head of the army; and France went near mad with joy that she had again found a king. Crafty Maurepas urged on the business; the Châteauroux suddenly realised his cunning glee—it separated her from the king.
PLATE VI.—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG WOMAN
(In the Louvre)
Of the rare portraits painted by Boucher, it is strange that the sitter to this finely painted canvas is now wholly forgotten. But the picture remains to prove to us the wide range of Boucher’s genius.
Out of the whirl of things Boucher’s fortune was ripening, little as he might suspect it.