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 general reassessment of Boucher's vast contribution to western culture, undertaken the largest exhibition of his paintings ever mounted. Organized in concert with the Detroit Institute of Arts, where the show can be viewed from May 27 until August 17, 1986, and with the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, which will present the exposition at the grand Palais in Paris from September 19, 1986, until January 5, 1987, this superb display of paintings, drawings, tapestries, and porcelains is open to the public at the Met until May 4. It is without question the highlight of that museum's very busy season and well worth the trip to New York City for anyone who can make it.
The exhibition comprises over eighty paintings by this gifted master, tracing his career from the early days of small-scaled and rather Italianate genre scenes, portraits, and landscapes through to his overwhelming classical allegories and garden vistas of salon dimension.
Many works that had been desired for the event have not been loaned, such as the splendid works permanently on view in London's Wallace Collection, the matching Rape of Europa and Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs and the pair Lever du soleil and Coucher du soleil; the pair of dazzling Marches hanging in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the portrait of Madame Boucher across the street in New York's Frick Collection; and others conserved in Leningrad, Munich, and elsewhere.
Nonetheless, those that did make the journey more than compensate for what is missing, and Manhattan is fortunate indeed to have so many canvases on loan from the Louvre as well as from the museums of New Orleans, Fort Worth, Columbus, Toledo, Kansas City, Tours, Lyons, and Nancy.
Voluptuous goddesses, lavish costumes, courtly pageantry, and idealized elitism all go
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