BOUCHER, FRANÇOIS

BOUCHER, FRANÇOIS. - French painter and etcher, b. in Paris in 1703, d. there in 1770. A pupil of Fr. Le Moyne, he initially followed in the footsteps of Watteau as an etcher and engraver. In 1727 he came to Italy with C. van Loo, where he came under the influence of Tiepolo’s art; in 1728 he was in Rome. He also made a journey to Holland in 1766. In 1734 he became a member of the Paris Academy, of which he was director in 1765. An exceedingly prolific draftsman (he himself said that he had produced no fewer than 10,000 drawings), he supplied cartoons for the Beauvais tapestry works (from 1734) and for those of Paris, of which he was inspector from 1755 to 1765, the year in which he was appointed « peintre du roi ». Active chiefly as a painter of mythological and allegorical scenes, he rarely executed works of religious subject matter (church of S. Luigi at Versailles, Chapel of Bellevue, Uffizi, Leningrad, Louvre, etc.). He was Fragonard’s master.