Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Plates bright and vivid. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The grace and elegance of Fran?ois Boucher’s paintings mark him out as the greatest artist of the time of Louis XV and the mirror to his age. His nymphs and shepherdesses still delight the eye today as they charmed Madame de Pompadour and her circle. Much of his successful career is well known to us but who Boucher was is still in some ways unclear. To Diderot his paintings were proof of moral decay and social corruption while to a later generation they embodied the lost charm of the Ancien R?gime. The undoubted brilliance of his best work is for some marred by a proliferation of copies and by a studio practice that sometimes leaves the autograph quality of his work in doubt. This book the first modern monograph on the artist sets out to put his achievement into the context of his times. Boucher was no libertine much less Madame de Pompadour’s pander. Rather he was a humble Parisian who rose by his talents to become the Premier Peintre du Roi and director of the Acad?mie. He was industrious – he claimed at the end of his life to have painted over a thousand paintings and executed ten times as many drawings. As well as commissions for the Crown and members of the Court he designed book-illustrations tapestries porcelain figurines even a clock-case. A major part of his achievement was as an entrepreneur. making works of art available to a wider marketplace an innovatory role that explains some of the ambiguity of his critical reputation. Boucher extended his gifts as one of the great Rococo painters into a range of new fields. (OS)