“Boucher: Seductive Visions”, at the Wallace Collection, is highly recommended by Sir Elton John, trustee of the museum and special Patron of the exhibition. “This Boucher event is going to be very special and I am delighted to support the Wallace Collection for this unique exhibition,” effuses the singer-songwriter, a man admittedly not given to understatement. “Boucher’s work is bold and sexy – very like me! I urge people to see the exhibition and experience art as fun.”

Francois Boucher (1703-1770) is long overdue some positive PR. Painter of landscapes, portraitist, designer of numerous stageset designs for opera and theatre, printmaker, tapestry-designer and, above all, the creator of myriad sexy mythological paintings, Boucher was for much of his career the pre-eminent artist of ancien regime Paris – a man whose talents were avidly sought at court, becoming at the peak of his powers the favourite of the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, who deluged him with opportunities to immortalise her beauty and advertise her longsuffering fidelity to her lover, Louis XV.

But the tides of taste turned against him during the last two decades of his life, when a new generation of self-consciously high-minded critics saw him as the epitome of a decadence and frivolity which – they feared – was emasculating the once-great nation of France. Denis Diderot led the attack in his reviews of the biennial Paris Salon, where Boucher was a regular exhibitor, establishing a set of preconceptions about the artist which have endured, largely unchallenged, to the present day. Diderot’s remarks about a picture entitled Shepherd Scene (a work not included in the Wallace Collection exhibition, but similar to several that are), penned in 1763, are representatively acerbic:

“Imagine… a shepherd, asleep with his head on the knees of his shepherdess. Scatter about them a shepherd’s...

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