Art History

French Rococo Era Painter, 1703-1770 Francois Boucher seems to have been perfectly attuned to his times, a period which had cast off the pomp and circumstance characteristic of the preceding age of Louis XIV and had replaced formality and ritual by intimacy and artificial manners. Boucher was very much bound to the whims of this frivolous society, and he painted primarily what his patrons wanted to see. It appears that their sight was best satisfied by amorous subjects, both mythological and contemporary. The painter was only too happy to supply them, creating the boudoir art for which he is so famous. Boucher was born in Paris on Sept. 29, 1703, the son of Nicolas Boucher, a decorator who specialized in embroidery design. Recognizing his sons artistic potential, the father placed young Boucher in the studio of François Lemoyne, a decorator-painter who worked in the manner of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Though Boucher remained in Lemoynes studio only a short time, he probably derived his love of delicately voluptuous forms and his brilliant color palette from the older masters penchant for mimicking the Venetian decorative painters.

Marie-Louise O’ Murphy was the youngest child of an Irish army officer. She was a celebrated French beauty, one of the younger mistresses of Louis XV and the model for Francois Boucher “The Resting Girl”. The youngest of seven, Marie-Louise was born to ex-Irish army officer Daniel O’ Murphy and his French wife relocated the family to Paris after the death of her husband. Through trying to make ends meet, the O’ Murphy family had to become a part of France's irreputable lifestyle, Marie-Louise danced, her mother traded in secondhand clothing and one of Marie-Louise’s sisters became an actress. It was at the home of her sister that the young Marie-Louise first came into contact with Giacamo Casanova – the infamous Venetian womanizer. Although in his memoirs he remembers her as a “pretty, ragged, dirty little creature”, Casanova