Boucher

Boucher was the most famous painter in 18th-century Europe. Then taste turned. This early 20th-century biography traces the arc of an artist who rose from modest Paris beginnings to become the favored painter of Louis XV and the Marquise de Pompadour, only to be dismissed a generation later as the epitome of aristocratic decadence. Macfall writes with evident admiration for a painter who defined the Rococo moment, its erotic mythological pastorals, its decorative exuberance, its unabashed embrace of beauty as political power. The book captures Boucher not merely as painter but as court figure, embedded in the cultural and political fabric of pre-revolutionary France. What makes this biography endure is its implicit argument: that the rejection of Boucher was itself a taste, not a verdict, and that revisiting his work reveals what the 19th century chose to forget about the pleasures and anxieties of the ancien régime. For readers curious about how artistic reputations are built, shattered, and rebuilt.