Le rocaille, le goût pittoresque, le petit goût, le goût moderne. During the eighteenth century these terms were used in equal measure to describe artistic production now categorized as rococo, a locution perhaps most famously coined in the “Van Loo, Pompadour, rococo” rallying cry of the students of Jacques-Louis David. Indeed just as the designation rococo was imposed upon the visual culture of an earlier era by those who later rejected its charms, so too was its theorization completed by its detractors, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alike. In titling her book Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics, Melissa Hyde asks us to consider the constructed nature of the rococo, demanding that we engage equally with the playful aspects of paint and language alike. What Hyde in fact offers may be characterized as a discourse analysis. While she provides us with many interesting and insightful discussions of individual paintings, her focus is on “how facets of the eighteenth-century critical debates surrounding the art of François Boucher (1703–70) intersected with contemporaneous social debates” (1), and consequently on how these might provide insight into aspects of Boucher’s œuvre. This is not, as one rather caustic review points out, a book for a generalist audience seeking answers to questions about “specific patronage, iconography, and styles,” but rather an engagement with “theoretical discourses about painters and art criticism.”¹ In this aspect I agree with the reviewer, but find this to be a laudable, and indeed a successful, endeavor rather than a shortfall.

Hyde’s title situates her work within a lineage of scholarship that has investigated the multivalent concept of “making up,” both in regards to coloristic painting and, more generically, the constitution of the self. The art of painting is, of course, one of “making up” in the sense of a creation whose basis is, at least in part, in the imagination. But Hyde’s etymological ancestry is both more specific and more varied. Most notably, Fiske Kimball titled his still-essential account of the period style The Creation of the Rococo (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1943), and Hyde’s own title makes evident her intentions to reconsider and reformulate a narrative of the rococo’s genealogy. “Making up” refers equally and in related manner to cosmetics. Here Hyde ably demonstrates the multivalent implications of maquillage as an embodied social practice with gender and class implications as well as particular associations with both Boucher and his most famous patron, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de Pompadour. It also functions as a rhetorical strategy. Hyde here builds upon foundational work by Elise Goodman on the significance of the eighteenth-century pictorial trope of the table de toilette, in particular for Boucher’s portrait of Pompadour, and Jacqueline Lichtenstein’s very different work on the relationship between aesthetics and rhetoric, most notably her discussion of the eighteenth-century art theorist Roger de Piles and the débat du coloris, the long-standing dispute over the relative importance of line and color for painting.² Yet the clearest precedent is Hyde’s own article, “The ‘Make-Up’ of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette,” from the September 2000 The Art Bulletin, in which she argued that, in Boucher’s depiction of Pompadour in the process of applying her rouge in her portrait at the Fogg Art Museum, we are presented not only with aspects of Pompadour’s own agency in the commission, but also, more generally, with the ways in which the self can be constructed or, literally, “made up.”³

Hyde’s The Art Bulletin article in many senses forms the core of the book and is reprised as chapter 3, “The Makeup of the Marquise.”⁴ Chapters 1 and 2, “Boucher, Boudoir, Salon: Cherchez la Femme” and “Making Up the Rococo” demonstrate the actively pejorative construction of the rococo and its relation to an equally constructed notion of gender, particularly femininity. Hyde disabuses the commonly held perception of Boucher as a woman’s painter, partly derived from the perception of a “Pompadour effect.” Yet there is more at stake than mere patronage patterns. As Hyde points out (citing eighteenth-century art and cultural criticism), the rhetorical strategies deployed against Boucher, the portrait genre, and the female sex as a whole shared remarkable similarities, focusing primarily on the artificial, or the “made-up.”

In chapter 4, “Pastoral Make-Believe: Gender Play from the Opéra-Comique to the Salon,” Hyde demonstrates the connection between Boucher’s pastorals and the comic operas of Charles-Simon Favart, demonstrating the possible flexibility of gender identity in both. She builds on these arguments in the following chapter, “Rococo Quid Pro Quo: Boucher’s Confounding Conventions.”⁵ In looking more closely at some of Boucher’s pastoral scenes, she argues that the history painter Boucher dismantles the tenets of that genre. The pastorals are patently anti-narrative, with gender itself becoming illegible or, rather, blurred, as Boucher transposes masculine and feminine figures so that a shepherd in one painting might reappear as a young maid or even an odalisque in another (191).

In the final chapter, “In the Guise of History: The Jupiter and Callisto Paintings,” Hyde offers an analysis of Boucher’s many—more than a dozen—variations on the theme of Jupiter and Callisto from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The narrative is rife with gender ambiguities as Diana’s nymph Callisto is seduced by Jupiter in the disguise of Diana herself. Yet Hyde convincingly demonstrates that Boucher’s depictions differ from both the Ovid text and typical pictorial depictions of it. According to Hyde, Boucher’s Callistos “have actually become female,” yet, “it cannot be said that Jupiter/Diana is unequivocally feminine,” whereas, Hyde argues, “such irresolution is never permitted in Ovid’s text, where Jupiter is always conspicuously identifiable—designated by the pronoun he” (207; emphasis in original). In this way, and building upon the extensive eighteenth-century social, literary, and cultural contexts that frame her book as a whole, Hyde contends that these paintings suggest ways in which certain aspects of identity—such as gender and social roles—may have been understood in the eighteenth century as contested, constructed, and in flux. The viewer of these Boucher paintings would then have been able to move back and forth between gender identities, thereby enacting the playful element of Boucher’s rococo style, itself a seeming prequel to postmodernism. This final brief chapter—twenty pages, including the copious and beautiful illustrations that are included throughout the text as a whole—demonstrates the greater implications of the book’s overarching argument. When Hyde points out that, after all, “there is never any real Jupiter behind the disguise, there is only art” (emphasis in original), the reader is left to wonder whether the same might be said of the eighteenth-century elites who would have taken pleasure from the paintings, and whether their identities might be understood as equally constructed and contingent, i.e., also as works of art (220).

Here it might be best to return again to the question of that particular avatar of the rococo, le goût moderne. It is often said that history is written by the victors. In the context of eighteenth-century French history this has meant interpreting the ancien régime predominantly through the lens of the Revolution and, in its art-historical corollary, through the lens of the production of Jacques-Louis David. The art of Boucher has long been understood as folly rejected by, and foil by which to understand, neoclassical rigor. In Making Up the Rococo, Hyde points to a new conception—more historically grounded, more visually acute—of what modern might mean to eighteenth-century Parisians, of what they themselves believed to be modern, namely Boucher and the rococo. Hyde concludes her book with the statement that “Boucher’s painting can no more be considered essentially feminine than essentially masculine—properly, they ought to be understood as both and neither” (220). But, in the end, is the question confined to these aforementioned “aspects of Boucher’s œuvre”? Might we be able to extrapolate further about what may have constituted a modern self for Boucher’s patrons, critics, and larger cultural milieu? The reader is left to consider the ways that Hyde’s “make up” is similar to what Dror Wahrman describes, in the context of Britain, as the “ancien régime of identity” in his Making of the Modern Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)—a work that, given the calendar of academic publishing, she may not have been able to consult. Hyde has, true to her word, given Boucher, “this ‘makeup artist’ his due,” but she has pointed the way to even more far-reaching questions concerning modernity, representation, and the modern self.

Hyde has been a significant force in the reshaping of the critical scholarship on Boucher, an artist whose importance is now, once again and justifiably, being recognized. Indeed Hyde’s monograph, published by the Getty Research Institute as part of its “Texts & Documents” series, which offers English translations of important art-historical texts and, less frequently, provides “new editions of the most adventurous international modern scholarship,” should not be confused with the volume that Hyde co-edited with Mark Ledbury, Rethinking Boucher, also published by the Getty Research Institute in 2006 as a part of its “Issues & Debates” series. That extensively illustrated volume compiles many of the papers that were presented in a thought-provoking 2003 symposium at the Getty, one of the reconsiderations of Boucher that surrounded the tercentenary of his birth. Art historians owe a debt of gratitude to the Getty Research Institute for an extended collaboration with Hyde resulting in the symposium and two beautifully produced volumes. They go a long way toward giving the rococo itself its due and inspiring a new generation of scholars to rethink le goût moderne on its own terms.