Boucher

by Haldane Macfall

But this, her sovereignty over the king, easy and light in its outward seeming, was a haggard nightmare to the calculating woman who had so longed for it. She knew no single hour’s rest from the night she won to the king’s bed. She had to fight her enemies, secret and open, for possession of the king’s will, day and night; and she fought—with rare courage. She won by consummate skill and unending pluck. She made herself an essential part of the king’s freedom from care. The Court party fought her for power with constant vigilance. Maurepas brought all his unscrupulous art, all his ironic mimicry, all his vile jibes and unchivalrous hatred to bear against her. He had made himself a necessity to the king; and he never slept away a chance of injuring her. He knew no mercy, no nobility, no pity. He made her the detested object of the people. With his own hands he penned the witty verses and epigrams that were sung and flung about the streets of Paris.

But she had an enemy more subtle than any at the Court—hour by hour she had to dispute the king with the king’s boredom. And it was in the effort to do so that she created her celebrated theatre in the private apartments, calling Boucher and others to her aid in the doing of it. Here the noblest of France vied with each other to obtain the smallest part to play, an instrument in its orchestra, an invitation to its performances.

Boucher left the Opera to become its decorator in 1748, and did not return until her death. For her, he also decorated her beautiful rooms at Bellevue. She bought at high prices many of his greatest masterpieces.

The Pompadour’s power so greatly increased that she openly took command of the king’s will; dared and succeeded in getting his favourite Maurepas banished; and herself took to the use of the kingly “we.” Her rascally father was created Lord of Marigny; her brother, whom the king liked well and called “little brother,” was created Marquis de Vandières; her only child, Alexandrine, signed her name as a princess of the blood royal, and would have been married to the blood royal had she not caught the small-pox and died. She amassed a private fortune, castles, and estates such as no mistress had dreamed of; and into them she poured art treasures that cost the nation thirty-six millions of money. She created the porcelain factory of Sèvres, kept keen watch over the Gobelins looms, and founded the great Military School of St. Cyr amidst work that would have kept several statesmen busy, and of deadly intrigues at Court that would have broken the spirit of many a brilliant man.

It was in her hectic desire to keep the king from being bored that she stooped, and made Boucher stoop, to the employment of his high artistry in the painting of a series of indecent pictures wherewith to tickle the jaded desires of Boredom, and thereby gave rise to the widespread impression that Boucher’s art was ever infected by base design. But Boucher was, at his very worst, but a healthy animal; and even in these secret works for the king he did not reach so low as did many an artist of more pious memory who painted with no excuse but his own pleasure.

As a matter of fact, the Pompadour has been blamed too much for this evil act, and too much forgotten for her splendid patronage of the man who, under it and during these great years of his forties, produced a series of masterpieces that place him in the foremost rank of the painters of his century. It is impossible to reckon the number of the pastorals and Venus-pieces that his master-hand painted and loved to paint, during these the supreme years of his genius. It is significant that they were painted during the years that saw the Pompadour in supreme power.

Boucher was so firmly established in 1750, his forty-seventh year, that he moved into a new house in the Rue Richelieu, near the Palais Royal. Disappointed in not receiving a studio and apartments at the Louvre, he was allowed to use a studio in the king’s library. He was now making money so easily that he was able to collect pictures and precious stones and the gaily coloured curiosities that appealed to his tastes.

The critics were becoming more and more censorious; and one of them hits true with the comment that in his pastorals his shepherdesses look as if they had stepped over from the Opera and would soon be off again thereto.

In his forty-eighth year Boucher’s art was at its most luminous stage—his atmosphere clear and subtle and exquisitely rendered; his yellows golden; his whites satin-like and silvery; his flesh-tones upon the nude bodies of his goddesses unsurpassed by previous art. The beauty of it all was not to last much longer.