François Boucher: 97 Drawings and Prints

François Boucher was French Rococo painter, engraver, and designer, who best represent the frivolity and elegant showiness of French court at the 18th century. His career was hugely successful and he received many honors, becoming Director of the Gobelins factory in 1755 and Director of the Academy and King's Painter in 1765. He was also the favourite artist of Louis XV most famous mistress, Mme de Pompadour, to whom he gave lessons and whose portrait he painted several times. Boucher the painter was no less prolific or varied as a draftsman. Drawings played a massive amount of roles in the preparation of paintings and as designs for printmakers, as well as being created as finished works of art for the growing market of collectors. For his major canvases, Boucher followed standard studio practices of the time, working out the overall composition and then making chalk studies for individual figures, or groups of figures. Oil and gouache sketches were also common components of Boucher's working process in the preparation of major commissions, although over the course of his career he increasingly made sketches as independent works. He was an incredibly productive artist, making thousands of drawings both as sketches and finished works in chalk, ink, pastel, preparing drawings for engraving, designing tapestries and painting in oils. His drawing mediums included pen and ink, chalk, pastel, sanguine and "trois crayons" technique.

Drawing revealing the artist at work and allows even the modern viewer to see the artist's hand in action. One of the most notable things about Boucher's superb draughtsmanship is energetic, economical line. Grace, beauty and power combine with a striking inner force. Boucher handles details easy, he describes the essential form in just a few marks, with just enough tone used to suggest the form and the features conveyed accurately but efficiently. At the same tame in Boucher's drawing the observer will notice that the energetic mark-making describes a solidly understood form and precisely observed detail. The learner of drawing will have much to get from this book.