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

Abstract

This study focuses on François Boucher's 1758 portrait of Mme de Pompadour at her toilette to explore cultural meanings implied in Boucher's painting and to reevaluate how the Rococo has been traditionally understood. The converging discourses of art making, “femininity,” artifice, and social class that inflect the picture are examined here. Also considered is how anti-Rococo art criticism became entwined with a critique of public women centered on the use of cosmetics, with each contributing to a devaluation of the Rococo as feminine and to a devaluation of “femininity” in the Enlightenment critique of elite culture.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.