|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
Blazes of Boucher at the Metropolitan
| Article
# : |
10004 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1986 |
1,933 Words |
| Author
: |
Gregory Speck
Gregory Speck is a freelance arts writer based in New York
City. |
As much as any painter of his day, Francois Boucher created a body of work that epitomized the sensibility of the Age of Louis XV, known to history as the age of Enlightenment. Born in 1703 in Paris, Boucher was apprenticed to his father for several years prior to his seventeenth birthday. Around this time he began to reveal the extraordinary gifts that would eventually lead him to a variety of positions, such as: first painter to the king; favorite portraitist of Louis XV's most famous mistress, la Marquise de Pompadour; director of the Academy; and leading designer of sets for the most important theatrical and operatic companies of Paris, of scenes for Sevres and Vincennes porcelain, and of cartoons for Beauvais and Govelins tapestries.
Active in the epoch when the Rococo style was in full bloom, Boucher partook of Baroque conventions and motives and transformed them into a more lyrical and elegant response to life. He interpreted classical and biblical passages with immense grace and delicacy, espoused idyllic pastoral retreat in his visual poems, and depicted the great personalities of the day with both majesty and understatement.
His oeuvre is the direct descendant of the masterly achievements of Titian and his Venetian followers, of Rubens and his Flemish disciples, and of Watteau, Boucher's immediate predecessor within the pantheon of French painters. His work was echoed in the grand tableaux of his contemporaries Tiepolo and Fragonard, in the opulent compositions of Delacroix, and even in the sweetly sensuous imagery of Renoir. In short, Francois Boucher was not only among the greatest artists of his day, but also one of the most significant painters in the history of art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has for that reason, and in view of the need for a
... (1997 of 11607 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
