The young couple settled down for the next ten years in the Rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre. Here Boucher lived through his thirties.
Madame was a pretty creature, if we had but Latour’s pastel portrait alone to prove it. But the pretty features were the crown to as pretty a body, for she sat often to her lord; and it is clear from his correspondence with a friend, Bachaumont, that she is the Psyche of his illustrated fable—and Psyche runs much to the Altogether. Marriage, however, was not likely to imprison Boucher’s gadding eyes; and it did not. Madame Boucher seems to have had as frail a heart, and avoided strife by amusing herself, amongst others, with the Swedish Ambassador, Count de Tessin, who, to gain access to the lady, commissioned Boucher to do the Watteau-like illustrations to Acajou—a dull affair. Boucher’s pretty wife, herself no mean artist, worked in his studio, and painted several smaller canvases after his pictures, gaining some fame as a miniaturist and engraver.
Nor did Marriage turn Boucher from his art. Two years were gone by since his nomination to the Academy; he had now to paint the formal Historical Picture and present it in order to take his seat as Academician; and it was in this his thirtieth year that he painted and won his academic rank with the “Renauld et Armide” now at the Louvre. Here he sufficiently subordinated his own style to the academic to ensure success; and the work was hailed by Academicians and critics, including Diderot, with enthusiasm. But even here we have his cupids peeping round the mythologic event; and Armide herself has pretty French lips that knew no Greek.
Once secure of his position, he straightway flung the last remnants of the academic style out of his studio door; and it is a grim comment on criticism that it was just exactly in proportion as he developed his own personal genius and uttered the France of his day, that he was attacked; whilst the stilted things that he knew were third-rate, and which he wholly rejected from henceforth, were exactly the things that were praised!
His election to the Academy, and the enthusiasm over the picture that won him his seat thereat, brought his name before the young king; the following year he received his first order from the Court whose painter he was destined to become. The decorations in the queen’s apartments were gloomy and had grown black; and he painted in their stead the “Charity,” “Abundance,” “Fidelity,” and “Prudence” still there to be seen. Indeed, with his gay vision, his pretty habit of culling only the flowers from the garden of life, and his quickness to set down the pleasing thing in every prospect, Boucher was the destined painter of a Court weary of pomposity and the pose of the mock-heroic, and which was wholly giving itself up to pleasure and the elegances.
But neither his new dignity of Academician nor the royal favour, kept him from the bookshops; and he illustrated, with rare beauty and a charm worthy of Watteau, the great edition of the Works of Molière in his thirty-first year. It is true that he made as free with Molière’s world as with the Gods of Olympus; he peoples the plays with characters of his own day, arrayed in the dress and habit of that day, and moving in surroundings that he saw about him.
PLATE IV.—PASTORALE
(In the Louvre)
The “Pastorale,” painted a few years after the famous “Diana,” also belongs to Boucher’s greatest years, and is another of the glories of the Louvre. It is one of his masterpieces in the realm of the Pastoral which he also created—those pleasant landscapes of France in which he places handsomely dressed Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses playing at a dandified comedy of the Simple Life.