Editing François Boucher (section)

==Drawings and prints==
[[File:François Boucher - Young Country Girl Dancing - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|''Young Country Girl Dancing'', black, red and white chalk and [[stump (drawing)|stump]] on paper]]

[[File:François Boucher, Aurora, c. 1733, NGA 111589.jpg|thumb|left|''Aurora'', c. 1733, [[National Gallery of Art]]]]

Boucher was a very prolific and varied draftsman. His drawings served not only as preparatory studies for his paintings and as designs for printmakers but also as finished works of art for which there was a great demand by collectors. Boucher followed standard studio practices of the time, by first working out the overall composition of his major canvases, and then making chalk studies for individual figures, or groups of figures. He also relied on oil and gouache sketches in the preparation of major commissions.

Gradually he made more and more sketches as independent works for the market. The [[:File:François Boucher - The Adoration of the Shepherds.jpg|''Adoration of the Shepherds'']] (Metropolitan Museum of Art), a free and painterly sketch in gouache, was long considered a preparatory sketch for Madame de Pompadour's private altarpiece ''La lumière du monde'' (ca. 1750, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon). Recent scholarship suggests, however, that it was made at least 10 years later as an autonomous work. In the last decade of his career the artist began to favor brown chalk, a fabricated medium.<ref>[http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/bouc/hd_bouc.htm Perrin Stein. ''François Boucher (1703–1770)''] at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 2003.</ref>

Boucher was also a gifted engraver and etcher. Boucher etched some 180 original copperplates. He made many etchings after Watteau. He thus helped propagate a taste for reproductions of drawings. When his own drawings began to sell, 266 of them were etched in stipple substitutes by [[Gilles Demarteau]]. These were printed in red ink so they resembled red chalk drawings which could be framed as little pictures. They could then be hung in the small blank spaces of the elaborately decorated paneling of luxury dwellings.

Boucher's most original inventions were decorative, and he contributed to the fashionable style of [[chinoiserie]], after having etched 12 'Figures Chinoises' (Chinese figures) by Watteau.<ref>[http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15324coll10/id/94303/rec/1 Alpheus Hyatt Mayor, ''Prints & People: A Social History of Printed Pictures''], Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), 1 January 1971, p. 589</ref>
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