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 God 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 goddess 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.

The whole of his life long, Boucher gave himself up with equal and passionate devotion to work and to pleasure—working at his easel often twelve hours of his day without losing, to the end when the brush fell from his dead fingers, his blitheness of heart or his generosity of act, and without weakening the pleasure-loving desires of his gadding spirit. Out of his splendid toil he made the means to indulge his tastes for pleasure; and the gratifying of his tastes in turn renewed and created the ideas that made the subjects of his artistry. He brought to all he did a joy in the doing that made of his vast labour one long pleasure—of his pleasures a riot of industry. He played as he toiled, scarce knowing which was play and which toil.

The gossip of his love-affairs makes no romantic story—they were but commonplace ecstasies with unknown frail women. But hard as he worked and lived and played, he found time to get himself married in his thirtieth year to pretty seventeen-year-old Marie Jeanne Buseau, a little Parisian—and for love of her, so far as he understood the business; for she brought him no dowry.

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 [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.