Boucher Part 1

Boucher.

by Haldane Macfall.

I

THE SMALL BEGINNINGS

The year after good Queen Anne came to rule over us, Louis the Fourteenth being still King of France, on an autumn day in the October of 1703, that saw the trees of Paris shedding their parched leaves as a carpet to the feet of the much-bewigged dandified folk who stepped it swaggeringly down the walks of the Palais Royal, swinging long canes, and strutting along the shaded promenades of the more fashionable places of the city, there stood in the vestry of the parish church of Saint Jean-en-Greve a little group of the small burgess folk, gathered about a little infant, whilst the tipstaff to the king's palace, one Francois Prevost, signed solemnly as witness to the birth-certificate and as acknowledged G.o.dfather to the aforesaid morsel of humanity, which, as the certificate badly set forth in black and white for ever, was henceforth to be known for good or ill as Francois Boucher, first-born son, on the 29th of September, four days past, of the tipstaff's friend, Nicolas Boucher, "maitre-peintre," who stood hard by, and of his wife Elizabeth Lemesle.

The worthy tipstaff's writing done, he bowed in the best Court manner to Mademoiselle Boullenois, daughter to yonder consequential fellow, the law officer from the Police Court; and handed her the inked quill to bear witness in her turn as G.o.dmother.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--MADAME DE POMPADOUR

(In the Wallace Collection)

Here we have one of the handsomest portraits of his great patron and friend, the notorious Marquise de Pompadour, painted by Boucher at the most brilliant phase of his art. It is a glittering achievement. The figure is superbly placed in its surroundings. The play of limpid light upon the beautifully gowned woman, of which Boucher was such a master-painter, proves it to be of his best period. The Pompadour stands, wreathed in smiles, as the mistress of a great domain; and masks as usual behind her pretty ways all hint of that calculating hand and remorseless will that sent her enemies without a sigh to the Bastille or banishment or worse--she who was past-mistress of the art of the _lettre de cachet_.]

The sand being flung upon the wet ink, and the blotting done, there was exchange of compliments in the stilted manner of good-fellowship of the day between priest and party--tapping of snuff-boxes and taking of snuff, with more than a little gossip of the Court and some shaking of heads, and under-lips solemnly thrust forth; the gossip is not without authority and weight, for is not G.o.dfather Prevost tipstaff to the king's majesty, therefore in the whirl of things?

The child, indeed, was born into a Paris agog with stirring affairs.

Well might heads be shaken solemnly. The French arms were knowing defeat. The Englishman, Marlborough, was flinging back the French armies wheresoever he gave them battle. Europe was one great armed camp. France was suffering terrible blood-letting. Defeat came on defeat. These were sorry times. On land all went wrong. Good generals were set aside; intriguing good-for-nothings led the veterans into disaster. But there was still France upon the high seas.

Then the women folk, bored with high politics, would draw back the talk to the infant Francois, and there would be genial banter about the morsel; for was he not a Sat.u.r.day child, therefore bound to be a bit of a scamp!

And so, off to Monsieur Boucher's modest little home in the Rue de Verrerie to a gla.s.s of wine and further compliments and banter, and more vague surmises as to what lay upon the knees of the G.o.ds for little Francois Boucher.

II

THE STUDENT

Yes, the sun of the Grand Monarque was setting. Louis Quatorze was nearing the end of his long lease of splendour. Our little Francois was not a month old when Admiral Rooke whipped Chateau-Renaud off the high seas, destroying the French and Spanish fleets in Vigo Bay, and carrying off some millions of pieces of eight from the galleons as treasure. The child's first year saw the English troopers ride down the French at Blenheim--a day that made "Malbrook" a name of dread to every French child, a name to frighten into good behaviour. To the little fellow's home came the horror-spoken talk of Ramilies; then of Oudenarde; then of Lille--to his six-year-old ears the terrible news of Malplaquet.

But there was Paris a-bellringing in his ears at seven; for there was born to the king's grandson a sickly child that was to succeed him as Louis the Fifteenth. And Francois Boucher is one day to step from his modest home and stand nearer at this child's side than he thinks.

The boy Boucher, at st.u.r.dy twelve, would recall the death of the old king in his lonely last years, and the setting upon the ancient throne of France of the five-year-old child as Louis Quinze--a comely little fellow--with Orleans as Regent. Young Francois Boucher was to spend his youth and grow up to manhood in a France that lay under the regency of this dissolute, brilliant Orleans.

Nicolas Boucher, the father, seems to have been an obscure, honest fellow, given to the _trade_ of art, and that too in mediocre fashion enough, designing embroideries, covers for chairs, and the like--"an inferior designer, little favoured by fortune," runs the recorded verdict of his day. But he had the virtue of recognising his mediocrity, and the desire to save his son from the sordid cares of mediocre artistry; since, having himself given the boy his schooling with pencil and brush, and brought the lad up in an atmosphere of art and in the company of artists, he had the astuteness to send him to the studio of Lemoyne, a really great painter and rapidly becoming famous--he who painted the ceilings of Versailles with G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses in handsome fashion.

Lemoyne was a well-chosen master for the promising youth of seventeen.

He had founded his art upon that of Correggio and Veronese, had rid himself of hard academic tendencies, and was painting in a sound French fashion. The youth Boucher, with the quick and astounding gift, that he displayed all through his life, of rapidly making his own what he wanted to acquire, picked up from Lemoyne at once a French way of stating what he desired to state, in a large, broad manner, without having to go through the long years of drudgery to Italian models of style which was then the only schooling for an artist--was therefore enabled to free himself from the equally long years that it would have taken him to rid the Italian style from his artistry. In short, the youth of seventeen made Lemoyne's art his own in a few weeks; and, on the eve of manhood, he so rivalled his master in accomplishment that it is dangerous to attribute a picture of this time to the master or the pupil without most careful evidence.

Yet the youth vowed that he was but three months with Lemoyne, who, said he, took scant interest in his pupils. But it must be remembered that Boucher was a prodigious worker, with a pa.s.sionate love for his work that lasted until death took the brush from his fingers, and that he had a quick and alert mind and hand, free from the hesitances of a student, and always daring in experiment. To wish to achieve a thing, for Boucher, was to set him to its achievement. He rested neither night nor day until he mastered that which he had set out to do. On the day he left Lemoyne's studio he stepped out of it a finished artist, a sound painter, fully equipped with all the craftmanship, trade-secrets, and tricks of thumb that it had taken his master his life to learn--and a facile copyist of his style and handling. It was the sincerest form of flattery; and Boucher, to the end of his days, held the art of Lemoyne in the greatest reverence--as is proved by his answer, when at the very height of his fame, to one who asked him to complete a picture by his master: "Such works are to me sacred vessels," said he--"I should dread to profane them by touching them."

Lemoyne's admiration for his pupil was not lacking in return. The youth painted, whilst with his master, a picture of a "Judgment of Susanna," before which Lemoyne stood astounded, then burst into prophecy of Boucher achieving greatness in the years to come.

From Lemoyne's studio, the young fellow went to live with "Pere Cars,"

the engraver, whose son, Laurent, was a friend of the youth, and who engaged him to design the drawings for his engravers, allowing him in return his food, lodging, and sixty livres (double-florins) a month--some twelve pounds. Boucher accounted his fortune made.

The cheery youth went at his work with energy and enthusiasm, blithely setting his hand to anything that was wanted of him, bringing charm and invention to all he did--tailpieces, frontispieces, emblems, coats of arms, freemason's certificates, first-communion cards, initial letters. He was soon set to work upon important designs for engravings. He searched out the publishers of books, and let no chance escape of working for them.

Thus and otherwise he filled his scanty purse--that needed filling, for he was quick at its emptying, being of a free hand and generous disposition. And hard as he worked, so did he play. Work and pleasure were his joy in life.

And all the time he was taking part in the students' compet.i.tions 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 Francois 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 Fete-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 "Pere 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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, Francois and Louis Van Loo.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.ddess 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.