Boucher Part 3

VII

THE END

The death of the Pompadour robbed Boucher of a friend; but her brother, Marigny, remained faithfully attached to the old artist, and seized every chance to honour him. On the death of Carle van Loo, Boucher, at sixty-two, was made first painter to the king, with all his pensions and privileges that were consistent with this the supreme appointment in the art world.

There had been serious intention of making Boucher the head of the Ecole des Eleves Proteges; he had the art of making himself liked and of inspiring the love of the arts. He was very popular with the students and artists, owing to his kindliness, his eagerness to render service, his readiness to encourage the youngsters or to console them.

When the riot took place, provoked by the Academicians by their award of the Prix de Rome in 1767, the students insulted the Academicians, but hailed Boucher with enthusiastic applause. The reason was not far to seek. When a student came to the old master for advice he did not "play the pontiff," and, scorning the false dignity of big phrases, he took the brush in his hand and showed the way out of all difficulties by simplehearted example, despising rules, and putting himself out in order to make things clear to a young artist.

However, the Academicians feared he would be an unorthodox master for youth, and appointed another in his place.

A long and serious illness thwarted his keen energies. Diderot was giving himself up to outrageous violence against him. If the old painter exhibited at the Salon, Diderot fiercely a.s.sailed his art; if he did not exhibit, Diderot as bitterly a.s.sailed him for his negligences. Above all, he attacked Boucher in that he did not paint what Diderot would have painted--but could not. "When he paints infants," cries Diderot, "you will not find one employed in a real act of life--studying his lesson, reading, writing, stripping hemp."

Poor unfortunate infants! for whom Philosophy could find no happier joy in life than _stripping hemp_! Boucher was but an artist. He painted his generation as far as he could see it, and, with all his faults and weaknesses, he never debauched his art with foreign and alien things that had no part in the nation's life; he painted fair France into his landscapes, not a make-believe land he did not know with preposterous Greek ruins; and best of all, to his eternal honour, he painted infants glad in their gladness to be alive, with no desire to send their happy little bodies to school, with no sickly ambition to make them into budding philosophers, with no thought of making them pose and lie as Men of Feeling. He had no joy in setting their little bodies to toil--in making them "teach a lesson to the spectator," in making them stoop their little shoulders to the "picking of hemp."

He continued to paint as he had always painted--except that he painted less well. The wreath of roses was wilting on a grey head. The blood jigged less warmly in the frail body. The features showed pallid--the eyes haggard. The sight failed. The hand alone kept something of its cunning.

He went to Holland with his friend Randon du Boisset, but health shrank farther from him. Diderot had near spent his last jibe.

In 1768, Boucher's sixty-fifth year, the neglected queen went to her grave. The king's grief and contrition and vows to amend his life came too late, and lasted little longer than the drying of the floods of tears over the body of his dead consort. A year later he was become the creature of a pretty woman of the gutters, whom he caused to be married to the Count du Barry--the infamously famous Madame du Barry.

But neither the remonstrances of Choiseul with the king against this further degradation of the throne of France, nor his unconcealed scorn of the upstart countess, nor the dangerous enemy he made for himself thereby, signified now to Boucher, first painter to the king.

Boucher was failing. His son was a prig and a disappointment. His two favourite pupils, Baudoin and Deshayes, who had married his two girls, died.

To the Salon of 1769 he sent his "Caravan of Bohemians." It was his last display. He had been going about for some time like a gaunt ghost of his former self, afflicted with all the ills inevitable to a life feverishly consumed in work and the pursuit of pleasure.

They went to his studio at five of the clock one May morning, and found him seated at his easel, before a canvas of Venus, dead, with the paint-filled brush fallen out of his fingers.

So pa.s.sed he away on the 30th of May 1770, in his sixty-seventh year.

When Boucher died, the generation of which he was the limner was near come to its violent end. The rosy carnivals and gay gallantries of his age gave way to the blood-stained romance and fierce tempest of the Revolution. The garrets of the old curiosity-shops received the discarded canvases of the master. His shepherds and shepherdesses were put to rout by the Romans of his pupil, citizen David. The old order was brought into contempt and overthrown. And with it, Boucher's art, like much that was gracious and charming and good in the evil thing, went down also, and was overwhelmed for a while.

For a while only. For just as, out of the blood and terror of the Revolution, a real France arose, ph[oe]nix-wise, from the ruin, and in being born, whilst putting off the vilenesses of the thing from which she sprang, took on also to herself the gracious and winsome qualities that place her amongst the most fascinating peoples of the ages; so Boucher has come into his kingdom again--the most gracious of painters that the years have yielded.