The Marquise de Pompadour
François Boucher (1703-1770) · c. 1750
Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis the Fifteenth and the most influential patron of the arts of her day, appears here in a small, rapidly painted study. Boucher worked in oil on paper, later laid down on canvas, and the support explains the sketchy freedom of the brush: the silks and lace of the dress are suggested in quick strokes, the flesh tones are laid in thinly, and the setting is barely indicated. Look at how much the painter conveys with so little. It is the kind of first idea from which the great full-scale portraits of the marquise, in Munich and elsewhere, were developed.
Boucher was the painter Madame de Pompadour preferred above all others; he taught her etching, decorated her houses and portrayed her repeatedly around seventeen fifty. The sketch turned up at Christie's in London in eighteen sixty-two and again in nineteen hundred and six, and then belonged to the Baron Basile de Schlichting, whose bequest brought it to the Louvre in nineteen fourteen. It was restored in nineteen forty-seven. Among the furniture and porcelain of her era, it puts a face to the taste that shaped this gallery.
Did You Know? Boucher painted this sketch on paper, which is why the brushwork looks so quick and free.
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