Yes, the sun of the Grand Monarque was setting. Louis Quatorze was nearing the end of his long lease of splendour. Our little FranÇois was not a month old when Admiral Rooke whipped ChÂteau-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 FranÇois 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 sturdy 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 FranÇois 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 gods and goddesses 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 passionate 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 “PÈre 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’ competitions 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 FranÇois 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 FÊte-Dieu—called the Exposition de la Jeunesse.

There was a thing happened about this time [Pg 23]
[Pg 24]
[Pg 25]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 “PÈre 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.

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, FranÇois 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.