François Boucher valuation
Painter to Madame de Pompadour, designer for the royal tapestry works, and the most fluent hand of the French Rococo.
François Boucher (1703–1770) was born in Paris, the son of a painter, and learned his trade partly as an engraver, making plates after Watteau's drawings for the collector Jean de Jullienne.
What a work by François Boucher is worth
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Bio
François Boucher (1703–1770) was born in Paris, the son of a painter, and learned his trade partly as an engraver, making plates after Watteau's drawings for the collector Jean de Jullienne. He won the Prix de Rome, studied in Italy in the late 1720s, and was received into the Académie in 1734. Over the next thirty years he painted mythologies, pastorals and nudes for the court and for Madame de Pompadour, whose portrait he painted several times; designed tapestries for the Beauvais and Gobelins manufactories, figures for Sèvres porcelain and sets for the Opéra; and in 1765 became First Painter to the King. The Rising of the Sun and The Setting of the Sun, which he painted for Pompadour, are in the Wallace Collection in London.
Boucher was enormously productive and ran a busy studio, so the market holds paintings by him, by his studio and by imitators, and the line between them is the main question. His drawings, in red, black and white chalk and in pastel, were made to be sold and collected in his lifetime and come to market far more often than his paintings. Many were reproduced as prints, above all by Gilles Demarteau, whose crayon-manner engravings imitate chalk so closely that framed examples are regularly mistaken for drawings. Tapestries and porcelain made after his designs are markets of their own, in which the manufactory, the date and the condition matter more than the name.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
