Of Boucher’s wander-years in Italy little is known. He seems to have shown scant respect for the accepted standards of the schools and the critics, to have found Michael Angelo “contorted,” Raphael “insipid,” and Carrache “gloomy.” He, in fact, was drawn only to such artists as were to his taste, and he had the courage to say so. However, whether he were kept idle from ill-health or not; whether his stay were short or not, he appears again in Paris in three years—suspiciously like the three years’ conventional Italian study of a first-prize winner of the Academy—with a large number of religious pictures to his credit—pictures that were hailed by the Academicians and critics alike for their beauty, their force, and their virility—pictures which, perhaps fortunately for Boucher’s repute, have vanished, or hang in galleries under other names.
Here we see Boucher grimly putting aside his own taste and aims in art, and doggedly bending his will and hand to a prodigious effort to win the reputation and standing of a “serious painter,” without which he could not hope to attain academic honours. He won them; for, in this his twenty-eighth year, on his return to Paris, he was “nominated” to the Academy. He had but to present an Historical Painting in order to take his seat as an Academician.
[III]
VENUS AND MARRIAGE
Back in his beloved Paris again; thrilled by the atmosphere and gaiety of its merry life; in the full vigour of manhood on the eve of his thirties; amongst congenial friends; done with the drudgery of winning to Academic honour, Boucher saw that the public were not falling over each other to purchase religious or historic pictures; he straightway turned his back upon these things, and on the edge of his thirtieth year he gave to the world his “Marriage of the Children of God with the Children of Men,” in which Venus is the avowed mistress of his adoration. It caused a fine stir, and greatly increased his repute.
In this picture he ends his Italian period and strikes his own personal note. Both this and the “Venus asking arms for Aeneas from Vulcan,” together with the “Birth of Adonis” and the “Death of Adonis,” of about the same period, still show Boucher strongly under the influence of his master, Lemoyne. Indeed, the “Birth” and “Death of Adonis,” their record lost during the scuffle and confusion of the Revolution, for long hung side by side as pictures by Lemoyne, until, being cleaned about 1860, Boucher’s initials were discovered upon them, and, contemporary engravings being hunted up, still further proved their origin. But in the Venus that now figures in all his works there is that flesh-painting of the nude, and that rosy touch upon the flesh of the female figure, that are a far more certain signature of Boucher’s handiwork than any written name.
Unfortunately the Salons were closed during Boucher’s earlier years until he was thirty-four, and the record of his work during these years is difficult to follow; but with his service to Venus his personal career begins, and the stream of his Venus-pieces steadily flows from his hands.
He came to her service rid of all prentice essays in craftsmanship, a finished and consummate artist. He found in his subject a goddess to whom he could devote his great and splendid gifts. He painted her dainty body with a radiant delight and a rare colour-sense such as France had never before seen or uttered. He remains to this day the first painter of the subtle, delicate, and elusive thing that is femininity; he caught her allure, her charm, as he was to catch the fragrance and charm of children and flowers; and he set the statement of these things upon canvas as they have never been uttered.
The whole of his life long, Boucher gave himself up with equal and passionate devotion to work and to pleasure—working at his easel often twelve hours of his day without losing, to the end when the brush fell from his dead fingers, his blitheness of heart or his generosity of act, and without weakening the pleasure-loving desires of his gadding spirit. Out of his splendid toil he made the means to indulge his tastes for pleasure; and the gratifying of his tastes in turn renewed and created the ideas that made the subjects of his artistry. He brought to all he did a joy in the doing that made of his vast labour one long pleasure—of his pleasures a riot of industry. He played as he toiled, scarce knowing which was play and which toil.
The gossip of his love-affairs makes no romantic story—they were but commonplace ecstasies with unknown frail women. But hard as he worked and lived and played, he found time to get himself married in his thirtieth year to pretty seventeen-year-old Marie Jeanne Buseau, a little Parisian—and for love of her, so far as he understood the business; for she brought him no dowry.