31]"/> 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 [Pg 33]
[Pg 34]
[Pg 35]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.

IV
LE MONDE QUI S’AMUSE

The Homely had come upon the town out of Holland, painted with most consummate artistry by Chardin, and was soon in the vogue. Boucher had a quick eye for the mode. And he straightway set himself to the painting of “La Belle Cuisinière.” Still-life and homely subjects need an accuracy of realism and a Dutch sense of these things, a sense of sincerity and an appreciation of the dignity of the work-a-day life of the people, in which Boucher was wholly lacking. Above all, it calls for a sense of “character,” which, in Boucher, was always weak. It was a sneer against him that his very broomsticks called for pompons and ribbons—and there was more than a little truth in the spite. He is more concerned with the accident of the kissing of a kitchen-maid than with the kitchen’s habit. He cannot even peep into a scullery without dragging in Venus by the skirts, and tricking her out in a property-wardrobe of a scullery-wench, in which the girl is clearly but acting the part.

However, these passing vogues and experiments in different methods were only gay asides—he was working the while upon his own subjects; and, to the display by its several members ordered by the Academy, he sent four little paintings of fauns and cupids which won him the honour of election as deputy-professor. His brain and hand were very busy, and he turns from one thing to another with amazing facility, bringing distinction to all that he does.

But he painted about this time two pictures of infants, “L’Amour Oiseleur” and “L’Amour Moissonneur,” which were the beginning of that host of cupids that he let fly from his studio; they frolic across his canvases and join the retinue of Venus, peeping out from clouds, over waves, round curtains, painted with a perfection that has never been surpassed in the portrayal of infants. He painted their round limbs, their lusty life, their delightful awkwardnesses, their jolly fat grace, their naïve surprise at life and glory in it, as they had never been painted before, and have never been painted since.

He also gave forth in this his thirty-third year a “Pastoral” and a “Shepherd and Shepherdess in Conversation,” with sheep about them and in a pleasant landscape, which were his first essays in the style that he created and which made him famous.

His friend Meissonnier, the inventor of the rococo, stood godfather to Boucher’s first-born son in the May of 1736.

From the very beginning Boucher seems to have been engraved. And these engravings, done by the best gravers of his day, greatly extended his reputation and popularised him; he fully realised the value of the advertisement as well as his profits from it. Before his thirty-third year was run out he published his well-known “Cries of Paris.” Boucher’s description of them, “studies from the low classes,” holds the key to that something of failure to realise the dramatic verities that is over all; it gives also the attitude of the France that he knew towards the France that he did not, and could not understand. He created that dainty, pleasant atmosphere that comes floating up to the windows on a fresh morning in Paris from the musical cries of the street vendors; but of the deeper significance of the street-sellers—of the miserable accent in their life, of their weary toil, of the dignity of their labour—he knew nothing; his brush could not refrain from making elegance and fine manners peep from behind the street-porter’s fustian or the milkmaid’s skirt.

But his thirty-third year was to contain a more far-reaching significance even than the creation of his cupid-pieces and pastorals. The “Cries of Paris” were scarce printed when Boucher’s illustration to “Don Quixote” appeared—“Sancho pursued by the servants of the Duke.” This design was to have far-reaching results that Boucher little suspected.

The painter Oudry had been called to the conduct of the great tapestry looms at Beauvais a couple of years before; and in his efforts to furnish the looms with good designs, he now called Boucher to his aid, whose original and fresh style, colour, and arrangement, together with his personal vision, and the enthusiasm and zeal with which he threw himself into the [Pg 39]