Hyde - Böcker

In 1761, Denis Diderot ascribed the fabulous success enjoyed by Francois Boucher (1703-1770) to "the libertinage, the brilliancy, the pompons, the bosoms and bottoms" that proliferated in the artist's canvases. For while Boucher's art charmed nouveau riche buyers and titled patrons, this was not always the case with critics, and modern scholarship has done little to challenge Diderot's eventual judgment that to admire Boucher's work is to be a stranger to "real taste, to the truth, to just ideas, and to the seriousness of art." This engaging study examines the motives behind the contemporaneous critical response to Boucher's picturesque repertoire of amorous peasants, blithe aristocrats, and fanciful mythological scenes, and to the rococo style in general. The vision of t rococo (feminine, aristocratic, decadent) and of Boucher (facile, libertine, debauched) that lingers in modern art history was invented by eighteenth-century critics bent on reform, both aesthetic and political.Exploring how the discrediting of Boucher and his school intersected with cultural debates about gender and class, this account of Boucher's art should persuade critics and admirers alike to take another, more considered look.

Francois Boucher (1703 - 1770) has suffered a curious fate: to have been so identified with the French Rococo as to have lost his visibility as an artist in his own right. "Rethinking Boucher" reclaims the artist's individuality, revealing not only the diversity of his talents but also the variety of visual and intellectual traditions with which he engaged. In part one, "The Various Boucher," Melissa Hyde, Colin Bailey, and Martin Schieder examine the artist's identity in relation to his portraits and self-portraits, his ingenious genre scenes, and his overlooked religious paintings. In part two, "The Unexpected Boucher," Katie Scott, Mark Ledbury, and Mary D. Sheriff focus on the network of social and cultural contexts in which the artist functioned, including the commercial print market, the theaters of Paris, and the contemporary textual explorations of the exotic. In the final part, "The Enlightened Boucher," Rene Demoris, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, and Thomas M. Kavanagh discuss Boucher's work as a vehicle for Enlightenment visions of the body, whether conjured by Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Madame de Pompadour, Boucher's most famous patron.