And all the time he was taking part in the students’ competitions for the Academy.
It was in his nineteenth year that, in this same Paris, in the house of one of its rich families, was born a little girl-child who was to come into Boucher’s life in after years. The father, a financial fellow, one Poisson, was a man of shady repute; indeed he was under banishment for mis-handling the public moneys at the time of the birth of the little girl-child, christened Jeanne Antoinette Poisson—destined to be the Jane of the scurrilous street songs of the years to come. But the careless student knew little of it as yet, nor that destiny had put into the pretty child’s cradle the sceptre and diadem of France as plaything.
Boucher, on the eve of manhood, took as little heed of the child’s coming as did the thirteen-year-old lad who sat upon the throne, and who, in little Jane Poisson’s first year, was declared to be of man’s estate and ruler of France, no longer requiring Regent Orleans to govern for him.
It was in this his nineteenth year that Boucher took the first prize at the Academy with his picture of “Evilmerodach, son and successor of Nebuchadnezzar, delivering Joachin from chains, in which his father had for a long time held him.”
This success set the collectors buying pictures by the brilliant youngster. But François Boucher needs no paying orders to make him work—he paints for the love of the thing, declares that his “studio is his church,” and seeks to display his art and spread the repute of it abroad. And his fame grows apace, if at a cost. Nay, he courts fame even to the extent of hanging his pictures upon the tapestries and carpets and such like draperies that the police oblige the citizens to hang out from their houses along the Place Dauphin and the Pont-Neuf during the procession of the Fête-Dieu—called the Exposition de la Jeunesse.
There was a thing happened about this time that was to be of large significance to the young fellow’s craftsmanship. Watteau had lately died, his eager will burning out the poor stricken body. His friend De Julienne, anxious to publish a book to Watteau’s memory, strolled into the engraving-studio behind “Père Cars’” shop, where Boucher and his comrade, Laurent Cars, were wont to spend a part of their time; and he commissioned Boucher to engrave 125 of the plates after the dead master. Watteau’s essentially French influence was the impulse above all others to thrust forward the development of Boucher’s genius along its right path, and sent his art towards its great goal. The business was a rare delight to the young artist, and in the doing of it he learnt many lessons which added greatly to the enhancement of his style; whilst the payment of twenty-four livres (double-florins) a day still further increased his delight and contentment.
PLATE III.—DIANA LEAVING THE BATH
(In the Louvre)
The “Diana leaving the Bath with one of her Companions” is amongst the most beautiful of those so-called Venus-pieces that Boucher created and painted in large numbers with decorative intent. It shows his art at its most exquisite stage, when his painting of flesh was at its most luminous and subtle achievement; and his treatment of the human figure in relation to the landscape in which it was placed, at its most perfect balance.
He completed the series with his wonted fiery zeal and rapid facility, and thus and otherwise, hotly pursuing his study of nature and his art, he arrived at the moment when his education should receive its inevitable finishing state in the Italian tour; so to Rome he went with Carle Van Loo and his two nephews, François and Louis Van Loo.