Fantasies and dreams
Andrew Lambirth
Boucher: Seductive Visions The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, WI, wail 17 April 2005 Sole Sponsor: British Land
That great pioneer of the rococo style, Francois Boucher (1703-70), master of the mythologie galante or erotic pastoral, is currently — indeed for the next six months — being feted at the Wallace Collection. The museum is remarkably rich in Bouchers (it houses the largest group of his works in the world) thanks to the taste of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, who effectively founded the Collection and bought Bouchers when they were out of fashion in the 19th century. In fact, the Marquess helped restore Boucher's reputation, an achievement which the current management of the Wallace Collection no doubt hopes to emulate with this show. I'm not so sure it will succeed.
The chief problem with an artist of Boucher's saucy reputation is that his work tends to be maintained (if at all) in the public eye by the agency of one particular painting — in this case, 'Girl Resting', or 'Blonde Odalisque' as she is more formally known. There are in fact two versions of this delicious nude, in Munich and Cologne respectively, said to be depictions of the Irish girl Marie-Louise O'Murphy, who became a mistress of Louis XV. Some accounts claim that the painting was especially commissioned to attract Louis' interest by those who wished to control his wanderings. Madame de Pompadour, who was maltresse en titre to Louis, was, after all, Boucher's great patron, and may well have taken a hand in the proceedings. Whatever its original purpose, this image is better known and better loved than any of Boucher's mythological subjects, and I don't believe you can mount a successful Boucher exhibition without it. At the Wallace, only a miniature copy of it is on view in a display case, pale and vapid, as if worn out with too much ogling over the years. With such a void at its heart, how can such a show succeed? It's not so much 'Seductive Visions' as 'Selective Visions'.
Yet the Wallace Collection clearly believes itself to be on to a winner. There's a hefty £6 admission charge (when traditionally the Wallace is free), and the building is all gussied up with frills and bows and banners. The press release quotes hyperbole from Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, and the catalogue at one point refers to Boucher the collector of exotic objects in the following vulgarly familiar terms: 'he loved to shop'. There's a definite feeling that an attempt is being made to 'sex up' Boucher for a younger market. One of the associated events, a debate supposedly, goes by the unenlightened title 'Pornography for Toffs?' Poor Boucher, to have been sunk so low.
It is salutary to remember that Boucher, trailing clouds of mythic sensuality in blue and rose harmonies, was a contemporary of Chardin, realist still-life painter par excellence. Boucher may be glorified as a history painter, but really he was a great imaginative painter, a factory of dreams and fantasies, a Court artist who turned his hand to countless tapestry designs, and whose typical imagery was reproduced on a whole range of Sevres porcelain, gold boxes and other precious artefacts. His very popularity was his downfall, for his detractors dismissed his work as fit only to decorate a chocolate box. And this of a man whose great decorative schemes had conquered kings and princes. His idealised pastel-coloured world was a great comfort to those in all walks of life, though its relevance today remains questionable.
Boucher is not Watteau, though he has been called Watteau's greatest posthumous pupil, and was engraving the master's images by the time he was 19 years old. Boucher doesn't have the same compelling originality as Watteau, a deep magic that transcends the ability to render flesh convincingly. Fine paintings of the order of 'The Music Party', 'Fête in a Park' and 'The Halt during the Chase', all by Watteau and all in the Wallace Collection, simply knock all of Boucher's efforts — even the vast and fishy 'Setting of the Sun' and 'Rising of the Sun' — for six. Even though Boucher was a competent portrait painter (see here his pleasing rendition of Madame de Pompadour), and could compose with the best of them an innocentseeming flower-bedecked pastoral full of fat-bottomed cherubs and pretty, plump girls, there simply is not the same spiritual depth that one finds in Watteau. But perhaps an extended comparison is unfair.
Boucher is essentially a light painter, to be taken lightly and enjoyed for his froth and flesh. I don't mean that he didn't work hard — he did, putting in from ten to 12 hours a day at the easel — simply that his effects are instantaneous, not complex and layered and appearing only over time, but refreshingly direct and ebullient. (At his worst, he edges towards the whimsical and frivolous.) He was a solid draughtsman, who, if in later years forsook models and relied too much on memory and imagination, nevertheless had discovered his type and was loyal to her corporeal delights. Sometimes there is a strange sort of stuffed-doll quality to the apparent inelasticity of the flesh, but it rarely descends to what one might call the urgent and misplaced firmness found in a late work such as 'Jupiter and Callisto'.
So how does this exhibition serve him? What you're really getting is a refocused permanent collection that you have to pay to see. Thus, if you wished to peruse The Swing' by Fragonard (Boucher's sometime pupil) or browse among the Watteaus, a past pleasure for many, you would have to enter this exhibition to do so. I can't help thinking the public is getting shortchanged — is the whole enterprise simply a moneymaking venture by the Wallace Collection? I hope not, though it occasionally feels like it. The 'Boucher Experience', as it might be termed, comes in two parts: the main exhibition is laid out upstairs in the impressive Great Gallery, while a subsidiary loan show is on display in the new basement galleries. The loan show will be changing: at the moment there's rather a fine collection of landscapes (until 12 December), which will be followed by Boucher: Dutch and Flemish Inspirations, organised with the Musee des Beaux Arts, Dijon (6 January-6 March 2005).
The landscape show is a substantial exhibition in its own right, particularly strong on drawings. Look, for instance, at 'Wooded River Landscape with Bridge' of 1749, done in black and white chalk on blue paper. Almost as ravishing as a nude. Then there's a red chalk confection (after Campagnola?), borrowed from the FitzWilliam, called 'Italian Village in a Mountainous Landscape', from more than 20 years earlier. There arc lots of things by Boucher's followers, including a beguiling Fragonard drawing in watercolour and graphite called 'Shady Walk', which has something in common with Graham Sutherland's famous neoromantic masterpiece, 'Entrance to a Lane' (1939). The paintings are of a high calibre and include Boucher's 'Gallant Fisherman' and 'Landscape with a Watcrmill'. I find their self-conscious artificiality slightly unwelcome, but others will be charmed by Boucher the landscape artist, who once remarked that 'nature is too green and badly lit' to work from, contending that his imagination was infinitely superior to the real thing. That, perhaps, was his problem.
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