Francois Boucher (1703-70) cannot be placed on the same plane as Watteau. If Watteau is essentially a poet, i.e., a man whose works have a mysterious meaning and who himself, urged by the divine power within him, has visions stretching be yond that mystery, Boucher is, on the contrary, typical of the artist whose ambitions are clearly defined and exactly propor tioned to his capacity: he desires to please his contemporaries, to decorate walls and ceilings for them, and, in his better mo ments, realizes perfectly what he has set out to do. Thus it is he who best sums up the taste of the century. He played, mutatis mutandis, and with all the differences implied by the very names of the two sovereigns, Louis XIV.—le grand roi, and Louis XV.— le bien aime, a role similar to that of Le Brun. He had decorative genius and the gift of composition, facile, elegant, and always perfectly balanced. He bore the weight of an immense output, illustrating a book, or finishing off a fan as aptly as he rumpled the draperies of complaisant goddesses or peopled sky and wave with rosy and golden nudes. As a decorator he had gifts in no way inferior to those of his fascinating contemporary Tiepolo; he could also paint excellent portraits such as the Jeune Femme au Manchon (Louvre), or render with brilliance and deftness inti mate scenes such as the Dejeuner (Louvre) or the Modiste (Stockholm). These, dating respectively from 1739 and 1746, are not isolated accidents ; they had been preceded by the attrac tive Dejeuner d'Huitres of J. F. de Troy dated 1735 (Musee de Chantilly) and the Dejeuner de chasse of Carle Van Loo, exhibited in the Salon of 1737.
Even amongst the court a strain of realism, visible in Oudry's, Lepicie's and Jeaurat's works, makes its appearance in France side by side with gallant mythology and decorative pastorals.
Chardin (1699-1779) in 1728 gained ad mittance to the Academy with two large canvases which were merely still-lifes : La Raie and Le Buffet. Their technical merit strikes us at once : in these pieces, handled with extraordinary tact and felicity, we find all the riches and subtlety of oil painting. But there also appears, even thus early, the sense of intimacy and the poetry of humble things which give to Chardin a place apart from even the best still-life and genre painters. Chardin is purely French; he is far nearer to the feeling of meditative quiet which animates the rustic scenes of Louis Le Nain a century earlier than to the spirit of light and superficial brilliance surrounding him, even in the so-called realism of his time. He does not, like his predecessors, seek his models among the peasantry; he paints the petty bourgeoisie of Paris. But manners have been softened, the petty bourgeoisie is far removed from Le Nain's austere peas ants. The housewives of Chardin are simply but neatly dressed and the same cleanliness is visible in the houses where they dwell.
Everywhere a sort of refinement and good-fellowship constitute the charm of these little pictures of domestic life, unique in their way and superior, both in feeling and subject, to the masterpieces of the lesser Dutch masters, Vermeer excepted. Equidistant in point of time from Louis Le Nain and Corot, Chardin like them attained through truth to a wholesome and honest poetry, truth as seen through French eyes, without rhetoric or pretensions.
Already, however, there was creeping into the work of more than one of his contemporaries the ideology which at that time invaded literature and is one of the worst enemies of good paint ing. The same causes then proceeded to bring forth the same effects both in England and in France. Greuze (1725-18o5) cor responds to Hogarth. Not that he felt the immediate influence of the painter of Marriage a la Mode; it is perhaps Chardin, imper fectly understood, who awakened him to his vocation, and whom he desired to surpass by a choice of subjects to him more inter esting and a mise-en-scene to him more moving. L'Accordee de village, La maledictionpaternelle, Le Fils puni, these ingenious— these too ingenious—compositions, where every detail is like an actor playing a part, seem borrowed from some comedie larmo yante or contemporary melodrama. Nor does any technical novelty afford relief from the mawkishness and falsity of sentiment. It is the mordant quality of his satire which saves Hogarth; nothing of the kind could be expected from the mediocre temperament of Greuze, who shows us, I believe, the first example in painting of a brilliant success that came little short of achieving fame which has not been ratified by posterity.
Portrait-painters, at that time, formed a remarkable galaxy headed by Tocque ; his lieutenants were not to be disdained, particularly Aved and Duplessis. But pastel, invented in France by Robert Nanteuil and later developed by Vivien, the painter of the Elector of Cologne, then assumed an unexpected importance under the stimulus of an observer of genius, Maurice Quentin de la Tour (1704-88) and a charming colourist, J. B. Perroneau (1715-83). La Tour is rather a draughtsman than a painter and for a man thus inclined—as we have already seen in the case of Nanteuil and shall see again in that of Degas, pastel is the chosen medium which frees the artist from the limitations of oil paint ing. But for La Tour, drawing, pencil, pastel, all these are means, in themselves indifferent, to seize upon the personality of his model. Human faces, human expressions, he cared for nothing else, but loved them passionately with a sort of disinterested frenzy. Nanteuil is graver, more profound; but no one has equalled La Tour in rendering the vivacity, mobility and sparkle of wit in a French face of the 18th century.