FRANÇOIS BOUCHER

 

Post 198 - Gautam Shah 

SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture 

François Boucher (1703-1770) was an artist with an elegant draftsmanship. He was called the Genius of the French Rococo period. His oeuvre consists of mythological Paintings, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes, idyllic and voluptuous art on classical themes, large number of preparatory drawings and independent sketches in chalk.

Boucher was as a master of the genre scene. He was very prolific and a varied draftsman. He was gifted engraver and etcher. Who etched some 180 original copper-plates. His main contribution to Rococo painting was his re-invention of the pastoral art, a form of idealized landscape populated by shepherds and shepherdesses in silk dress, enacting scenes of erotic and sentimental love.

Boucher work was characterized by the ‘use of delicate colours, high-toned palette, gently modelled forms, facile technique, naturalism and light-hearted fanciful subject matter’.

Boucher worked in virtually every medium and every genre, creating a personal idiom that was widely reproduced in print form. His portrayal favours the riches and idyllic rural innocence with eroticism, passion and amor. He regularly used his own wife and children as models. He was highly adept at marketing his work, providing designs for all manners of decorative arts, from porcelain to tapestry.

Boucher became art faculty member in 1734, and promoted as Professor and then Rector of the Academy. He was an inspector at the Royal Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries (carpets and tapestries) Manufactory. He was also associated with royal porcelain factories. He was Premier Peintre du Roi (First Painter of the King) in 1765. He designed theatre costumes and sets.

Boucher worked out the overall composition of his major canvases, and then making chalk studies for individual figures, or groups of figures. He used chalk, oil and gouache for studies. To meet commercial demand, he made independent sketches. He also produced style of Chinoiserie art (8th C characterized by the use of Chinese motifs and techniques).

Boucher, in the later part of life, lost the preeminence in the art market, due to overproduction, sterility of his creativity, poor copying of his painting themes into tapestries and etchings and emergence of Neoclassicism.

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