Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles (Nov 2022)
Les destins croisés de François Boucher et Jean-Nicolas Servandoni
Abstract
A major painter of the French 18th century, François Boucher had a brilliant career during the reign of Louis XV, becoming first painter to the king in 1765. Like other artists of his generation, such as Charles-Joseph Natoire, he had a constant fascination with the world of the stage, which influenced his entire oeuvre. Less known because of the scarcity of sources, his work as a set designer and designer of costumes for operas and the fairs was very important, bringing the painter to rub shoulders with talents as famous in their time as Jean Monnet, the Favarts and Jean-Nicolas Servandoni. Boucher was one of Servandoni’s close friends. During the 1730s and 1740s, Boucher and Servandoni succeeded each other as heads of set design at the Académie Royale de Musique in Paris and sometimes worked on the same productions. In the middle of the century, their careers seemed to diverge but the two artists never ceased their activity for the stage, whose profound changes they accompanied, in the 1760s.
Keywords
