The "Makeup" of the Marquise: Boucher's Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette

It is true that this is makeup (un fard), but we should wish that all current paintings were made up in this way. We already know that all painting is only makeup, that it is part of its essence to deceive, and that the greatest deceiver in this art is the greatest painter.--Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes [1]

I would say he's never for a single instant seen nature.... [In Boucher's painting] there are too many pinched little faces, too much mannerism and affectation for an austere art. He can show them to me unadorned if he likes, I still see the rouge, the beauty spots, the pompons, and all the little vials of the makeup table.--Denis Diderot, Salon of 1765 [2]

For a short while in February 1756 rumor had it at Versailles that Mine de Pompadour would give up her rouge. This intelligence about the royal favorite's toilette was noted by chroniclers of court life not, as one might expect, because of its interest as a bit of charming ephemera. Rather, they marked the matter as one of considerable portent, for at the court of Louis XV, to paint or "illuminate" the face (s'enluminer le visage) was much more than a beautifying ritual: it was a symbolic practice, intimately bound up with court politics and social identity. Ceasing to paint was equally significant. It follows, then, that the portrait of Pompadour in the act of performing her toilette (Fig. 1), painted by Francois Boucher (1703--1770) in 1758, [3] is more than a traditional homage to her beauty. As recent scholarship has suggested, it, too, is connected with court politics--namely, the favorite's struggles to regularize and consolidate her position after the love affair with Louis had ended. [4] However, it i s my argument that the significance of this picture goes still beyond the specifics of the marquise's tribulations at court. Boucher's painting has deeper cultural meanings that are inflected by converging discourses of art making, "femininity," artifice, and social class.

This exquisitely rendered, half-length portrait, now in Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum, shows the marquise seated in a chair of yellow ocher brocade before a dressing table strewn with the accoutrements of the toilette: ribbon, sprays of flowers, a powder box of chased gold crowned by a downy white puff. To the right of the composition is the back edge of a small cheval glass. Pompadour faces forward, her head inclined ever so slightly to her right, as she looks out directly. One hand holds an open box of rouge, the other daintily clasps a cosmetic brush, loaded with color and poised for application to her cheeks. On her right wrist she conspicuously displays a cameo bracelet bearing the profile of Louis XV. There is an air of studied informality in her costume: as was her habit when holding court at her ritual public toilette, she appears here in a loose, pearl white neglige du matin, cinched at the throat by a wide pink ribbon and parted across the front to reveal the low-cut bodice of her gown, gorge ously trimmed with lace and a ladder of bows. Tonalities of white and pink dominate the composition: the delicate pallor of her alabaster skin and the rosiness of her cheeks and lips are variously echoed in her gown and mantle, the cameo, tablecloth, and powder puff.

Though a familiar sort of subject to any student of eighteenth-century art, its treatment in this painting is unusual. The painting itself is surrounded by uncertainties with regard to its provenance and making. Nothing is known about its commission, though almost certainly it belonged to Pompadour's brother, the marquis de Marigny. [5] Whatever the circumstances of its making, the picture must have been intended for a private audience of cognoscenti such as Marigny and his circle, as it was never exhibited at the Salon. Its physical history is complex: originally a small, rectangular, bust-length portrait, the canvas was subsequently extended on the bottom and right side to include the tabletop and its embellishments, with a small slice of the mirror visible (as in Fig. 17). Precisely when these elements were added remains a matter of some conjecture. That they are eighteenth-century additions there seems no doubt; that they were made soon after the original bust-length image was painted is also probable. [6 ] To complicate matters further, the painting was enlarged yet again, apparently early in the nineteenth century, when it was transformed into its present oval format. The questions surrounding the physical history of the painting are clearly important ones that beg for more precise answers. Since I am concerned with the cultural meanings implied in this picture, they are not crucial questions for my purposes.

The line of argument to be developed here is that on one level Mme de Pompadour at Her Toilette is about the representation of identity--class and gender identity, and also artistic identity. It is a reflection on what I take to be some of the emblematic attributes of French Rococo art and the elite public that sponsored it: namely, a passion for the cosmetic arts, indeed, for the arts of appearing in general. Further, it involves an understanding of these arts as a vehicle for fashioning and representing identity--for the "making up" of a self that often troubled the clear-cut distinctions between classes and/or genders called for by much of French society. [7] Through its unique composition and spatial organization, its use of familiar pictorial conventions associated with self-portraiture, and the equivalence it proposes between subject matter and medium, the Fogg painting figures the "makeup" of identity through self-representation as a form of art making--itself often culturally constructed in the eighte enth century as a form of makeup, as I intend to show.