[copyright reserved]

Artist: François Boucher
Title: Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette
Date: 1758
Size: 81x 63 cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

Belonged marquise de Marginy who is the sitter’s brother, this bust portrait of Mme de Pompadour differentiates itself from other full length Pompadour portraits from its chosen setting, event and sitter scale. As a private painting, Pompadour retains her signature style of beauty with strong self-awareness, intense confidence and absolute control embedded and beyond the canvas.

Pompadour during her makeup bears rich layers of meaning in re-inventing and legitimising her identity as royal mistress whose power penetrates beyond her private space. Series of juxtapositions, such as minute brushworks hides artist’s trace while Pompadour holds her rouge brush and rouge box filled with Pompadour Pink. This only warm colour repeats in her dress, ribbons and lips. Source of colour chain, the rouge box, held in her hand and guide her presentation. Visible neglect of her mirror while directly addressing viewers from her gaze, this extends her control beyond the canvas. Her steady and naturalistic pyramidal gesture further addresses confidence about her appearance. Placement of flowers and puffs on the table echoes with her white skin and flower in her hair, also these accessories deliver a sense of reality in a toilette but show her need in them for her court identity.

Being Pompadour’s favourite artist, Boucher selectively chose elements charged with her power and style. Besides the pompadour pink, putting flowers in hair was also a fashion popularized by Pompadour. This rather intimate and private portrait of Pompadour, despite of use full length convention for court portraits, still poses Pompadour’s power resulting in her beauty.

Nature beauty would eventually cease, but Boucher’s brush certainly allows the longest preservation.