Confounding Conventions: Gender Ambiguity and Francois Boucher's Painted Pastorals

I would like for the two sexes, who according to a famous Englishman, are so commingled and confounded that they form but one, to be separated according to inclinations that would be inspired in them carefully from the earliest age, and for them to have congress only in order to contribute to the general good and to their common happiness.

—Gaudet, La Bibliothèque des petits-maîtres (1741)

Men who separate themselves from women lose politeness, softness, and that fine delicacy which is acquired only in the presence of women.

—Madame Lambert, Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes (1727)

In The Confessions of a Fop, Jean-François de Bastide’s urbane narrator characterizes polite society of mid eighteenth-century Paris in these lustrous terms:

Everything in le monde is enchantment for a young man: that certain uniformity that exists between the sexes, the rouge, the dazzling attire, the diamonds, that air of coquetry, the appearances of sentiment, the respective pleasantries, the mutual obligingness; in short, all of those attractions that one discovers ceaselessly seducing the mind and the heart of a young man, and forming for him the most breathtaking spectacle in the universe. ¹

A shimmering, luxurious world, redolent with the parfum de l’artistocratie and romantic intrigue—this description of le monde is proffered with an ironic affection for the coded sociability and lavish artifices of exclusivist society. The assertion that a “certain uniformity between the sexes,” was occasioned by the participation of women and men in the traditionally female devotions of the toilette, adornment and coquetry, would also seem to articulate one of the abiding clichés about mondaine culture—that it was, above all, feminized. Certainly it was roundly criticized as such by some of the brightest luminaries of the Enlightenment. Rousseau’s disapprobation of Parisian society in his Letter to d’Alembert, is one famous example. ² However, Rousseau was far from alone in his insistence that the empire of mondaine women had resulted in the effeminization of men and of cultural domains conceived of as properly masculine—namely in the discourses of science and literature, in theater, and painting; and in verbal discourse in general. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, for one, declared in his treatise on theater of 1773: “Women are consulted too much, their taste is sufficiently refined, but not extensive enough. Since they have been guiding the arts, the arts have been degenerating. They like the polished, the elegant, the facile. But that which is energetic does not touch their souls.” To clinch his point Mercier added that women “have sapped and enervated painting, in idolizing the illuminations of Boucher.” ³ Mercier’s claims exemplify a common conviction about the deleterious effects of mondaine women on French culture, but they also indicate how definitively François Boucher (1703–70) was identified as the symbol of “womanish society” and its degenerate artifacts.

This emblematic association between Boucher and mondaine culture originated with anti-rococo art criticism, acquiring its fullest authorization in Diderot’s Salons. With constant reference to the coquetry of Boucher’s false, made-up colors, Diderot sniped at the “joli Boucher” ⁴ for pandering to little society women and their toadies, as in his Salon of 1761:

He was made to turn the heads of two sorts of persons, the gens du monde and artists. His elegance, his affected winsomeness, his novelistic gallantry, his coquetry, his taste, his facility, variety, brilliancy, his made-up complexions, his debauchery, necessarily captivate petits-maîtres, little women, young men, the crowd of those who are strangers to real taste, to the truth, to just ideas and to the seriousness of art; how could they resist the ostentation, the libertinage, the brilliancy, the pompons, the bosoms and bottoms, Boucher’s epigrammatic wit. ⁵

One of Diderot’s earliest recorded assessments of Boucher was, “He has become a painter of fans”—an analogy Diderot would invoke frequently in his Salons. ⁶ On one level this was simply a form of sharp-witted ridicule that demoted the painter from academic “Peintre Historien” to guild artisan, by treating the...