There is one trap of reputation for those rare artists who come to epitomize their age: when the society goes down, so do they. An extreme case in point was François Boucher. The son of a French needlework designer, he became the most successful French painter of the 18th century, the favorite of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Born in 1703, Boucher lived through the climax of the ancien régime and died less than two decades before it did. "In him," wrote Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in their great defense...
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