But neither the remonstrances of Choiseul with the king against this further degradation of the throne of France, nor his unconcealed scorn of the upstart countess, nor the dangerous enemy he made for himself thereby, signified now to Boucher, first painter to the king.
Boucher was failing. His son was a prig and a disappointment. His two favourite pupils, Baudoin and Deshayes, who had married his two girls, died.
To the Salon of 1769 he sent his “Caravan of Bohemians.” It was his last display. He had been going about for some time like a gaunt ghost of his former self, afflicted with all the ills inevitable to a life feverishly consumed in work and the pursuit of pleasure.
They went to his studio at five of the clock one May morning, and found him seated at his easel, before a canvas of Venus, dead, with the paint-filled brush fallen out of his fingers.
So passed he away on the 30th of May 1770, in his sixty-seventh year.
When Boucher died, the generation of which he was the limner was near come to its violent end. The rosy carnivals and gay gallantries of his age gave way to the blood-stained romance and fierce tempest of the Revolution. The garrets of the old curiosity-shops received the discarded canvases of the master. His shepherds and shepherdesses were put to rout by the Romans of his pupil, citizen David. The old order was brought into contempt and overthrown. And with it, Boucher’s art, like much that was gracious and charming and good in the evil thing, went down also, and was overwhelmed for a while.
For a while only. For just as, out of the blood and terror of the Revolution, a real France arose, phœnix-wise, from the ruin, and in being born, whilst putting off the vilenesses of the thing from which she sprang, took on also to herself the gracious and winsome qualities that place her amongst the most fascinating peoples of the ages; so Boucher has come into his kingdom again—the most gracious of painters that the years have yielded.
The plates are printed by Bemrose & Sons, Ltd., Derby and London
The text at the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh