He was painting masterpieces that make his name live. To his fortieth year belong the famed “Birth of Venus,” the “Venus leaving the Bath,” the “Muse Clio,” the “Muse Melpomene,” and the three well-known pastorals now at the Louvre—“The Sleeping Shepherdess,” the “Nest,” and the “Shepherd and Shepherdesses.” Of the many famous Venus-pieces that his hand painted during these years it is not easy to write the list. But having signed the “Marriage of Love and Psyche” at forty-one, he turned his experimental hand to the homely, realistic Dutch style that was having a wide vogue, and painted the “Dejeuner”—a family of the prosperous class of the day at breakfast—showing with rare charm the surroundings and home life of the well-to-do of his time.
All goes well with Boucher. He changes into better quarters in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré, where he lived for the next five years, until 1749; but his eyes are fixed upon a studio and apartments at the old palace of the Louvre, though the hard intriguing of his powerful friends at Court on his behalf failed for some time. He had, indeed, to make another move before he arrived at his longed-for goal. Pensions Boucher, like others, had found to be somewhat empty affairs; but rooms at the Louvre were a solid possession eagerly sought after by the artists.
In this year of 1744 Boucher created a new fashion at the annual Salon by sending studies and sketches instead of finished pictures; and it set a value upon such things not before realised by artists, for success was instant and loud.
Towards the end of the next, Boucher’s forty-second year, the Swedish Ambassador, Count de Tessin, who was to take his leave of Paris, commissioned four pictures to represent the day of a woman of fashion, and to be entitled “Morning,” “Midday,” “Evening,” and “Night.” Boucher painted one of these for him, now known as the “Marchande de Modes.” The others were painted later, and all had a wide vogue as engravings. The correspondence has interest since it reveals Boucher’s business habits; he was paid for a picture on its delivery, and for each of these he was to receive 600 livres (double florins or dollars)—about a hundred and twenty pounds.
In an official document of the Director of Buildings to the king (or Minister of Fine Art, as we should say), written in this year of 1745, Boucher being forty-two, is a “list of the best painters,” in which Boucher is singled out for distinction as “an historic painter, living in the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré, opposite the Rue des Deux-Ecus, pupil of Lemoyne, excelling also in landscape, grotesques, and ornaments in the manner of Watteau; and equally skilled in painting flowers, fruit, architecture, and subjects of gallantry and of fashion.”
Not so bad for dry officialdom; the critics could learn a lesson. For he was nothing less. What indeed does he not do? and wondrous well! this painter of the age.
And the mighty rush of events is about to sweep him into further prominence; the very things which he probably passed by with a gay shrug are to enrich him, to help him to his highest fulfilment.
Poor Châteauroux saw that she must lose the king’s gadding favour in the conflict with Maurepas unless she joined her lord, now with the army. She realised full well that she had created the new Louis of Ambition—that her going must bring the people’s hate to her. But she dared not lose the king. And she went. Maurepas had overdone his jibings. The indiscretion at once rang through the land; became the jest of the army—and Maurepas was not far from the bottom of the business. The discreet indiscretion of covered ways between the king’s lodgings and hers only added to the mockeries, and increased the people’s hate against, of course, the Châteauroux. Then upon a day in August the small-pox seized Louis at Metz; poor Châteauroux fought for possession of the king in the sick room, until his fear of death—Louis’ sole piety—sent her packing—shrinking back in the hired carriage at each halting-place for change of horses, lest she should be seen and torn from her place and destroyed by the populace. But Louis recovered; Paris rang with bells at joy on his recovery, and he entered the city amidst mad enthusiasm, hailed as The Well-Beloved. He sent for the Châteauroux to find her dying, Maurepas having to deliver the message of recall. She died suddenly and in great agony, swearing that Maurepas had poisoned her—died in the arms of her poor discarded sister, the De Mailly.
But this year of 1745 Boucher hears a mightier scandal that is to mean vast things to all France—and not least of all to François Boucher.