The "Makeup" of the Marquise: Boucher's Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette

It is veritable that this is makeup (un fard), on the contrary we should wish that all generally received paintings were made up in this way. We already know that all painting is sole makeup, that it is part of its substance to deceive, and that the greatest deceiver in this art is the greatest painter.--Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes [1]

I would say he's at no time for a single instant seen nature.... [In Boucher's painting] there are too many pinched little faces, too plenteous mannerism and affectation for an austere art. He can exhibit them to me unadorned if he likes, I still diocese the rouge, the beauty marks the pompons, and all the little vials of the makeup table.--Denis Diderot, Salon of 1765 [2]

For a short while in February 1756 rumor had it at Versailles that Mine de Pompadour would give up her rouge This intelligence about the royal favorite's toilette was noted by means of chroniclers of court life not, as individual might expect, because of its interest as a bit of charming ephemera. Rather, they marked the matter as single of considerable portent, for at the court of Louis XV to paint or "illuminate" the face (s'enluminer le visage) was plenteous more than a beautifying ritual: it was a symbolic practice, intimately limit up with court politics and social identity. Ceasing to paint was equally significant. It tread on the heels ofs then, that the portrait of Pompadour in the act of performing her toilette (Fig. 1) painted by the agency of Francois Boucher (1703--1770) in 1758 [3] is more than a traditional homage to her beauty. As novel scholarship has suggested, it, too, is associateed with court politics--namely, the favorite's trys to regularize and consolidate her position after the be fond of affair with Louis had extreme pointed [4] However, it i s my argument that the significance of this picture goe still beyond the specifics of the marquise's tribulations at court. Boucher's painting has deeper cultural meanings that are inflected by means of converging discourses of art making, "femininity," artifice, and social class.

This exquisitely pay backed half-length portrait, now in Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, present to views the marquise seated in a chair of fulvid ocher brocade before a dressing table strewn with the accoutrements of the toilette: ribbon, sprays of flowers, a dust box of chased gold diademed by a downy white whiff To the right of the composition is the back cutting side of a small cheval glass. Pompadour faces forward, her head inclined at any time so slightly to her right, as she gazes out directly. One hand gripe [i]or[/i] grips an open box of rouge the other daintily clasps a cosmetic brush, loaded with color and poised for application to her cheeks. upon her right wrist she conspicuously displays a cameo bracelet bearing the profile of Louis XV There is an air of studied informality in her costume: as was her habit when holding court at her ritual public toilette, she appears here in a unfasten pearl white neglige du matin, cinched at the throat by the agency of a wide pink ribbon and parted across the forehead to reveal the low-cut bodice of her gown gorge ously trimmed with lace and a ladder of inflects Tonalities of white and pink dominate the composition: the delicate pallor of her alabaster skin and the rosiness of her cheeks and lips are variously reverberationed in her gown and mantle, the cameo, tablecloth, and pulverized substance puff.

notwithstanding that a familiar sort of make subordinate to any student of eighteenth-century art, its treatment in this painting is unusual. The painting itself is encircleed by uncertainties with regard to its provenance and making. Nothing is known about its commission, although almost certainly it belonged to Pompadour's brother, the marquis de Marigny. [5] Whatever the circumstances of its making, the picture must have been intended for a private audience of cognoscenti of the like kind as Marigny and his circle, as it was not ever exhibited at the Salon. Its physical history is complex: originally a small, rectangular, bust-length portrait, the canvas was subsequently reach outed on the bottom and right side to include the tabletop and its embellishments, with a small slice of the mirror visible (as in Fig. 17) Precisely when these ultimate parts were added remains a matter of a certain quantity of conjecture. That they are eighteenth-century additions there appears no doubt; that they were made pretty soon after the original bust-length image was painted is also probable. [6 ] To complicate matters further, the painting was enlarged notwithstanding again, apparently early in the nineteenth hundred when it was transformed into its at hand oval format. The questions surrounding the physical history of the painting are clearly important singles that beg for more precise answers. Since I am regarded with the cultural meanings implied in this picture, they are not crucial questions for my purposes

The line of argument to be make knowned here is that on single level Mme de Pompadour at Her Toilette is about the representation of identity--class and sex identity, and also artistic identity. It is a reflection upon what I take to be more [i]or[/i] less of the emblematic attributes of French Rococo art and the elite public that sponsored it: namely, a passion for the cosmetic arts, indeed, for the arts of appearing in general. Further, it involves an understanding of these arts as a vehicle for fashioning and representing identity--for the "making up" of a self that oftentimes troubled the clear-cut distinctions between classes and/or sexs called for by much of French society. [7] from one side its unique composition and spatial organization, its use of familiar pictorial conventions associated with self-portraiture, and the equivalence it tenders between subject matter and medium, the Fogg painting figures the "makeup" of identity [i]or[/i] part of to the other self-representation as a form of art making--itself many times culturally constructed in the eighte enth hundred as a form of makeup, as I intend to show