Francois Boucher Giclée Fine Art Prints 4 of 7

For more than three decades, François Boucher (1703-1770) was at the pinnacle of French painting with his immense talent and astonishing productivity. His career was brilliant and he enjoyed all kinds of honours. A creator of religious and secular compositions, Boucher was also a landscape painter, illustrator, draughtsman, and decorator. His rich oeuvre is not always alien to mediocrity, but his works remain a magnificent hymn in praise of woman. The artist glorifies her for her beauty and charm, whether she is a goddess, a mother, a worldly lady, sweet or chaste.

Boucher polished himself in the studio of François Lemoine in the tradition of applied art and made his living as an illustrator and engraver under Jean-François Carr. In 1724 he received the first prize of the Royal Academy, which took him to Rome, where he remained until 1731. There he studied the Baroque works of Pietro da Cortona and the painting of Correggio. He was admitted a member of the Academy alongside "Rinaldo and Armida", and subsequently became its director and first royal painter (1765). He worked intensively and achieved immediate success: combining artistic direction of the great royal manufactories of Beauvais and the Gobelin brothers, the production of sets for the theatre and opera, and commissions from the sovereign and Madame de Pompadour, who patronised him. She installed him in the Louvre in 1752. With the tapestries "The History of Psyche" (1739), also the two famous series "The Love of the Gods", Boucher emerged as the most ingenious and inventive decorator of the Louis XV era. His sensuality, his virtuosity, his limpid and vivid tones, his attraction to artistic craft give charm to his large-scale mythological scenes as well as to his portraits (Marquise de Pompadour).