Doyen and Greuze also helped her with suggestions; but she was from the beginning her own teacher. Davesne and Briard only flattered themselves by claiming her tutoring. The girl showed in no way any slightest sign of their influence. Ardent and enthusiastic in her pursuit of art, she haunted the galleries and private collections, but above all she went to Nature. Naturalness is by consequence a marked attribute of one who painted in this artificial age—in portraiture she largely escaped the conventional style, both its limitations and, be it also confessed, something of that great beauty of style and that superb decorative splendour that mark the handsome achievement of Nattier and Drouais and their fellows. Nor must it be forgotten that the realism claimed by the later years, and the naturalism claimed for this girl's art, were already to be seen in full career in the master-work of La Tour in portraiture, and in the still-life of Chardin. This girl's genius never reached to the force of La Tour, nor the superb handling or colour-sense or vigour of Chardin, but she painted with rare skill the eminent women of her day and, with near as remarkable a skill, more than one man; her loss would have left a serious gap in the statement of the French genius of the end of the seventeen hundreds.
It has been a custom too long indulged in by literary critics to praise her at the expense of Boucher's "conventionality"; but she never painted a portrait that surpassed the Wallace "Pompadour" or the "Infant Orleans," to say nothing of other rare portraits from Boucher's easel. To set her up in rivalry against one of the greatest decorative artists of the years is but to give her an ugly fall. The astounding part is not that she painted better than she did, but that she achieved what she did.
But free from convention? No. She was a woman, and a painter of women—a painter of women from the woman's point of view that desires the world only to think of woman in her pose as woman, reticent, careful to screen the impulsive, most of all the vexatious, the violent, and the irregular moods of femininity's temperament from the eyes of the passer-by; always eager to show woman dressed for the part, and well dressed. She was incapable of stating the deeps of character; and had she had the power, she would have looked upon it as something of an indecency—or worse, an indelicacy. She would, in fact, have preferred to deny the deeps. She sets her sitter ever in the drawing-room of fashion, draws a heavy curtain with a rattle between the drawing-room and the inner boudoir (the "sulking room"), slams the door on the bedroom, or any hint that there is a bedroom, before she cries "come in," to admit us to her studio; she prefers to show the woman in her properties as the creature of fashion, not in the intimacy of her inner living and full significance.
This is as much and as absolutely convention as any tricking out of ladies as Dresden shepherdesses, and the more subtle in that it is the less obvious; as much convention as any painting of large eyes or rose-bud mouths. It is as misleading as convention. But it is the basis of a woman's life; and, in that, it is true.
Boucher has been blamed for being conventional; is often sneered at as the arch-make-believe. But when he painted women he painted them as men really see them with their masks off, and with all their allure of femininity. This sneer of convention is a two-edged sword.
In the year that they found Boucher dead, seated at his easel before an unfinished canvas of Venus, this girl of fifteen discovered herself celebrated; saw her studio invaded by the flower of the world of fashion; the women of the nobility at the French Court visiting her; the exclusive doors of the Faubourg St. Germain thrown open to her; princesses, duchesses, countesses, celebrities of the day and strangers of distinction her friends. She was in close touch with the leading artists of her day—Le Moyne, blunt Quentin de La Tour, and the rest.
The girl, in spite of her astounding industry, was soon wholly unable to carry out the orders for portraits which rained in upon her; her charm of manner and her increasing beauty added to the pressure of the siege of her admirers.