French Rococo Era Painter, 1703-1770 Francois Boucher seems to have been perfectly attuned to his times, a period which had cast off the pomp and circumstance characteristic of the preceding age of Louis XIV and had replaced formality and ritual by intimacy and artificial manners. Boucher was very much bound to the whims of this frivolous society, and he painted primarily what his patrons wanted to see. It appears that their sight was best satisfied by amorous subjects, both mythological and contemporary. The painter was only too happy to supply them, creating the boudoir art for which he is so famous. Boucher was born in Paris on Sept. 29, 1703, the son of Nicolas Boucher, a decorator who specialized in embroidery design. Recognizing his sons artistic potential, the father placed young Boucher in the studio of François Lemoyne, a decorator-painter who worked in the manner of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Though Boucher remained in Lemoynes studio only a short time, he probably derived his love of delicately voluptuous forms and his brilliant color palette from the older masters penchant for mimicking the Venetian decorative painters. | | | | | | |

Marie-Louise O’ Murphy was the youngest child of an Irish army officer. She was a celebrated French beauty, one of the younger mistresses of Louis XV and the model for Francois Boucher “The Resting Girl”. The youngest of seven, Marie-Louise was born to ex-Irish army officer Daniel O’ Murphy and his French wife relocated the family to Paris after the death of her husband. Through trying to make ends meet, the O’ Murphy family had to become a part of France's irreputable lifestyle, Marie-Louise danced, her mother traded in secondhand clothing and one of Marie-Louise’s sisters became an actress. It was at the home of her sister that the young Marie-Louise first came into contact with Giacamo Casanova – the infamous Venetian womanizer. Although in his memoirs he remembers her as a “pretty, ragged, dirty little creature”, Casanova was impressed with her beautiful face and figure of the girl that he introduced her to his friend, the celebrated painter, Francois Boucher. Boucher proceeded to paint a rather successful nude of the young Marie-Louise. The painting was soon brought to the attention of Louise XV, he had a queen, the Polish princess Marie Leszczyńska, but had so many mistresses that they had a system and there was even a formal court position for his favorites. The Head Mistress from 1745 to 1764 was Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, better known as Madame de Pompadour. Marie-Louise was soon seen as the second mistress. This is probably exactly what Boucher and Marie-Louise herself had intended through way of the erotic painting, it showed what Marie-Louise had to offer the king. Her youthful beauty and natural way with the king soon made her his number one mistress, She suffered a difficult miscarriage in 1753 that almost claimed her life, and this resulted in Louis becoming closer and closer to her. She became known as “La Belle Morphise” (a play on her Irish surname and also the modern Greek for ‘beautiful”).

Francois Boucher , Resting Girl , 1751, Wallraf- Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany,
Oil on Canvas

Jean August Dominic Ingres , The Grand Odalisque, 1814, The Louvre, Paris, France,
Oil painting

Grande Odalisque, also known as Une Odalisque or La Grande Odalisque, is an oil painting of 1814 by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres depicting an odalisque, or concubine. Ingres' contemporaries considered the work to signify Ingres' break from Neoclassicism, indicating a shift toward exotic Romanticism. Grande Odalisque attracted wide criticism when it was first shown. It has been especially noted for the elongated proportions and lack of anatomical realism. The work is housed in the Louvre, Paris.show moreThe painting was commissioned by Napoleon's sister, Queen Caroline Murat of Naples, and finished in 1814. Ingres drew upon works such as Dresden Venus by Giorgione, and Titian's Venus of Urbino as inspiration for his reclining nude figure, though the actual pose of a reclining figure looking back over her shoulder is directly drawn from the 1809 Portrait of Madame Récamier by Jacques-Louis David. Ingres portrays a concubine in languid pose as seen from behind with distorted proportions. The small head, elongated limbs, and cool color scheme all reveal influences from Mannerists such as Parmigianino, whose Madonna with the Long Neck was also famous for anatomical distortion.This eclectic mix of styles, combining classical form with Romantic themes, prompted harsh criticism when it was first shown in 1814. Critics viewed Ingres as a rebel against the contemporary style of form and content. When the painting was first shown in the Salon of 1819, one critic remarked that the work had "neither bones nor muscle, neither blood, nor life, nor relief, indeed nothing that constitutes imitation". This echoed the general view that Ingres had disregarded anatomical realism. Ingres instead favored long lines to convey curvature and sensuality, as well as abundant, even light to tone down the volume. Ingres continued to be criticized for his work until the mid-1820s.Stemming from the initial criticism the painting received, the figure in Grande Odalisque is thought to be drawn with "two or three vertebrae too many." Critics at the time believed the elongations to be errors on the part of Ingres, but recent studies show the elongations to have been deliberate distortions. Measurements taken on the proportions of real women showed that Ingres's figure was drawn with a curvature of the spine and rotation of the pelvis impossible to replicate. It also showed the left arm of the odalisque is shorter than the right. The study concluded that the figure was longer by five instead of two or three vertebrae and that the excess affected the lengths of the pelvis and lower back instead of merely the lumbar region.Given how the duty of concubines was merely to satisfy the carnal pleasures of the sultan, this elongation of her pelvic area may have been a symbolic distortion by Ingres. While this may represent sensuous feminine beauty, her gaze, on the other hand, has been said to "[reflect] a complex psychological make-up" or "[betray] no feeling". In addition, the distance between her gaze and her pelvic region may be a physical representation of the depth of thought and complex emotions of a woman's thoughts and feelings