The Art Bulletin

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Boucher’s Spirit: Authorship, Invention, and the

Force of Porcelain

Susan M. Wager

To cite this article: Susan M. Wager (2022) Boucher’s Spirit: Authorship, Invention, and the Force
of Porcelain, The Art Bulletin, 104:3, 55-83, DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2022.2036029

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2022.2036029

Published online: 15 Aug 2022.

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1  Meissen Porcelain Factory, after Johann Joachim
Kändler, Figure Group of Children, modeled ca. 1758,
made 1760–65, hard-paste porcelain, painted in
enamels and gilt, 61/8 × 5 × 37/8 in. (15.5 × 12.8 ×
10 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London (artwork
in the public domain; photograph © Victoria and Albert
Museum, London)
Boucher’s Spirit: Authorship, Invention,
and the Force of Porcelain
susan m. wager
In late 1755 the antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) moved from Dresden
to Rome, where he would write his History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), a paean to ancient
statuary and formative text for the modern art historical discipline.1 In effect, the move
exchanged one sculptural center for another. While the Eternal City was unmatched in its
wealth of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, the Dresden court in Saxony was the origin of a
very different kind of sculpture: modern Rococo porcelain figurines (Fig. 1). In an oft-quoted
passage from Winckelmann’s 1767 Comments on the History of the Art of Antiquity, the author
laments the effect of these figurines on contemporary taste, calling them “ridiculous dolls
[lächerlichen Puppen].”2 Like the vacuous and purely decorative elements of the late Baroque
or Rococo art that Winckelmann sought to reform through a Neoclassical return to the past,
porcelain figurines were valued more for their precious
materiality than for their intellectual or formal con-
tent.3 The “beautiful material” of porcelain had yet to
be elevated by the “genuine artistry” or the “worthy
and perceptive imagination” he associated with ideal
beauty.4 The analogy with dolls or puppets suggests
that these figurines were problematic not only because
of their frivolous themes and formal excess but also
because of their proximity and attachment to the view-
er’s body. Unlike an autonomous sculpture imbued by
the artist with a sense of movement, puppets are lifeless,
spiritless, and dependent on the viewer’s hands in order
to move. Their insistent physical presence is antithetical
to Winckelmann’s emphasis on spatial and temporal
distance as an ideal condition for viewing works of art.
The second part of his History concludes by compar-
ing the modern viewer of antiquity to a stranded lover
struggling to make out the image of her beloved as he
sails into the distance.5 The perpetually receding image
of lost antiquity requires a more engaged form of atten-
tion than the modern, miniaturized, and ever physically
present porcelain figurine.6 Winckelmann’s departure
for Rome in search of this irretrievable past coincided
with an important artistic and technical innovation—
one with the potential to recover that ideal aesthetic
experience in the viewing of porcelain figurines.
Unglazed or “biscuit” porcelain figurines, introduced
in France in the early 1750s, defied assumptions about
porcelain’s irreducible materiality and complicated fun-
damental eighteenth-century ideas about authorship.
55
2  Pierre-François Tardieu, after Pierre-Étienne Falconet,
after François Boucher, Little Boy Holding a Wreath
and Basket of Flowers, from Deuxième Livre de Figures
d’après les porcelaines de la manufacture royale
de France (Second book of figures after porcelains
from the royal manufactory of France), after 1757,
etching and engraving, 93/4 × 71/2 in. (24.8 × 19
cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris
Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph licensed under a CC0 License)
3  Niccolo Vanni, after Filippo Morghen, Tavola
XXXII, from Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano e contorni
incise con qualche spiegazione, vol. 1, Naples: Nella
Regia Stamperia, 1757, 175. Universitätsbibliothek
Heidelberg (artwork in the public domain; photograph
licensed under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 License)
In 1762 a French periodical likened biscuit porcelain figurines designed by the quint-
essentially Rococo artist François Boucher (1703–1770) to ancient paintings unearthed at
the site of the lost ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. The comparison is jarring not only
because it plucks a set of “ridiculous dolls” from the physical present and sends them into
the distant past but also because it defies traditional art historical periodization, according
to which the promiscuous Rococo is diametrically opposed to the austerity and restraint
of antiquity. Vastly different objects are brought together, torn out of historical context
in a manner similar to the “museum without walls” of the art theorist André Malraux
(1901–1976)—an imaginary museum transcending geographic limitations. Just as Malraux’s
virtual museum depended on mediation through black-and-white photographs, the Boucher/
Herculaneum comparison was based on the objects’ mediation through the homogeneous
graphic language of reproductive prints. The comment followed the announcement of a 1761
set of prints after the porcelain figurines (Fig. 2); a volume of prints after the ancient paint-
ings was announced in the same issue of the periodical (Fig. 3).7 Still, the objects’ perceived
common denominator was not so much stylistic and material as spiritual: both depicted play-
ful children whose “effortless poses” registered the universal verve driving youthful play.8 The
comparison turns, in other words, on figural poses abstracted from the material presence of
porcelain and from the physical presence of Boucher’s hand.
The period considered here was marked by advancements in the codification of
connoisseurship and by the consolidation of singular authorship around the characteristic
56 The Art Bulletin September 2022
forms of an artist’s manner or hand.9 Reproductive prints were increasingly exploited to shore
up the authority of singular works of art and to reinforce the link between authorship and
the mark of the hand. While other prints tried to faithfully replicate the physical marks of
Boucher’s drawings, the 1761 prints reproduced the porcelain figurines after his drawings,
rather than the drawings themselves. The biscuit porcelain figurines, we will see, conjured the
presence of Boucher’s hand, even as they asserted their own precious materiality. When the
figurines were reproduced in prints, however, Boucher’s touch and its sensuous conjugation
in porcelain were made to recede into the distance—like Winckelmann’s sailor—as a perpetu-
ally dematerializing outline.
The stated purpose of the 1761 prints—to preserve through reproduction a set of
Rococo porcelain figurines—contradicts assumptions about the insistent materiality of por-
celain and the decorative arts, apparent in Winckelmann’s writings and still persistent in the
discipline. Porcelain is often seen as an embodiment of the Rococo licentiousness and whimsy
that reigned in European art at the height of the material’s popularity.10 It is light and fragile,
and its sensuousness veered at times into the erotic; the term itself derives from the porcellana,
or cowrie shell, named for its resemblance to the female sex organ.11 Instead of elevating the
mind, porcelain figurines appealed to the body—violating the Platonic idealism at the foun-
dation of Western aesthetics, transgressing the boundary between interested and disinterested
pleasure, and fueling materialistic frenzy or hoarding.12
By 1930, when the influential German art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968)
reflected on the ontological distinctions between the fine and decorative, or “applied,” arts,
he used Rococo porcelain figurines as a test case. While works of fine art, Panofsky argued,
are “first and foremost materialized conceptual forms,” applied arts are “first and foremost formed
material”—the material precedes the form, and the form is dependent on the material.13 To
illustrate the point, he compared classical Greek statuary to eighteenth-century porcelain
figurines made at the Meissen Manufactory in Saxony, site of the first successful attempt at
producing porcelain in Europe: “the material bronze did not bear the same importance in the
Athens known to Myron [the Greek sculptor active in the middle of the fifth century bce] as did
porcelain for the Meissen Rococo figures.” 14 Panofsky correlated the distinction between the fine
and applied arts to relative reproducibility: while the Greek sculpture lent itself to reproduc-
tion in other media, the Rococo figurine did not.
The 1761 prints after Boucher’s porcelain figurines attempted precisely what Panofsky
deemed an implausible task. To be fair, Panofsky probably envisioned enameled or glazed
figurines, while these were made of unglazed or “biscuit” porcelain, a significant innovation
introduced at the Vincennes (later Sèvres) French royal porcelain manufactory around 1752.15
Modern scholarship folds this technical innovation into an anachronistic story of stylistic
change, according to which luminous, brightly colored, glazed porcelain gave way to unre-
flective, white, unglazed porcelain as the Rococo taste for shiny, glittering surfaces gave way
to the Neoclassical taste for stony restraint.16 Biscuit’s matte white surface is often compared
to marble, and shortly after its appearance the professional sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet
(1716–1791) was put in charge of the figural atelier at Vincennes-Sèvres.17 Falconet introduced
a proto-Neoclassical aesthetic to the manufactory’s largely Rococo design repertoire and
reproduced some of his own marble sculptures in biscuit. His appointment is widely under-
stood as a crucial turning point in the manufactory’s history, when figural ornament was
reconceived as sculpture proper.18 This narrative obscures what was particularly innovative
about biscuit and makes the first wave of biscuit figurines—Boucher’s jaunty children and
amorous shepherds (Fig. 4)—seem ridiculous, like trinkets aspiring to be monumental sculp-
ture, or embarrassing mistakes awaiting Falconet’s arrival.19 By disentangling the history of

57 boucher’s spirit
4  Vincennes Manufactory, after Pierre Blondeau, after
François Boucher, La Danseuse (Dancer) and Le Joueur
de musette (Bagpiper), ca. 1752, soft-paste biscuit
porcelain, 81/2 × 51/2 × 31/8 in. (21.6 × 14 × 8 cm) and
9 × 51/4 × 31/8 in. (22.9 × 13.4 × 8 cm). Cleveland
Museum of Art, Cleveland (artwork in the public
domain; photograph licensed under CC0 License)
porcelain figurines from the history of Neoclassicism, we find that biscuit’s sculptural poten-
tial was recognized well before Falconet arrived. Instead of merely reinforcing the prestige of
marble as an ersatz substitute, early biscuit figurines complicated ideas about creativity and
authorship on which that prestige was founded.
The Renaissance concept of disegno, denoting both the intellectual (design) and
manual (drawing) aspects of the artistic profession, is key to the phenomena explored here.
Disegno, which for the artist Federico Zuccari (1540/41–1609) was rooted in “sign from God,”
or segno di Dio, could refer to the spiritual or immaterial concept (a cousin of Panofsky’s
“materialized conceptual form” and Winckelmann’s “ideal”) preceding the realization of a
drawing, or to the physical drawing itself, or both.20 Although the French dessein once had
the rich duality of disegno, by this period it had splintered into the conceptual dessein (plan)
and physical dessin (drawing).21 In Boucher’s biscuit porcelain figurines, however, dessein and
dessin seemed to converge.
Following a brief overview of the technical, nationalist, and artistic context in which
(glazed) porcelain figurines were collected and produced in early modern Europe, I shall trace
the interwoven histories of biscuit’s development and Boucher’s relationship with Vincennes-
Sèvres. The remainder of the essay—its core—reveals the intersection of Boucher’s biscuit
figurines with eighteenth-century art theoretical discourse on creativity and genius: first,
through a close reading of art criticism by the abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc (1707–1781); then,
58 The Art Bulletin September 2022
through analysis of the 1761 reproductive prints. Made during Falconet’s tenure at Vincennes-
Sèvres, the prints can be read as a visual corollary to the sculptor’s extensive writings on art.
The prints dissolve the figurines’ physicality even as they purport to preserve them for
posterity, and they construct an author who is spatially and temporally unmoored from the
autographic mark. At the center of this reproductive sleight-of-hand were Boucher’s ridicu-
lous dolls and the spirit that brought them to life. These porcelain figurines were perhaps the
exception that proves Panofsky’s proposed rule for distinguishing between the fine and deco-
rative arts. But the story traced here undercuts the fundamental premise, still pervasive in the
field, that such a distinction should determine the boundaries of the art historical discipline.

Material “Excellence”/Formal “Failure”

The collecting and manufacture of porcelain figurines in seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Europe were driven by a widespread obsession with the unique physical qualities of
the material itself. “True” or hard-paste porcelain was an extraordinarily precious commodity
in early modern Europe.22 The ceramic material—a mixture of kaolin (a type of clay) and
petuntse (a feldspathic rock), fired at an extremely high temperature (above 1200° C)—had
been produced in China since around 600 ce but eluded European manufacturers until
the early eighteenth century.23 Compared to other ceramics, porcelain was unusually strong
(enough to hold hot beverages) but ethereally weightless and sonorous, and its semitrans-
lucent, natural whiteness connoted purity.24 Compounding its desirability was the mystery
surrounding the seemingly alchemical process of transforming humble earth into a precious
substance.25 Driven by national rivalry and economic ambition, European chemists and pot-
ters labored for centuries to replicate “white gold.” Porcelain was finally achieved in Saxony in
1708; two years later a royal manufactory was founded there, in the town of Meissen (north-
west of Dresden.) France would not achieve porcelain until 1769.
From the European perspective, China led the way in technological innovation but
was inferior in artistic invention and execution, particularly in the representation of human
figures—the key element of disegno. The French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot
(1713–1784) wrote that while the Chinese “excel in material” they “absolutely fail in taste and
form; they will be making magots for a long time . . . in a word, they lack the genius of inven-
tion and discovery that shines today in Europe.”26 The term magot referred to Chinese and
Japanese statuettes of human figures characterized by bodily contortions, bright colors, exag-
gerated facial expressions, and often portly physiques.27 The simian etymologies of magot and
the interchangeable marmouset (one the French term for a species of monkey; the other the
origin of the English “marmoset”) reflect the ethnocentrism and racism built into the artistic
discourse on these objects, often described as subhuman perversions of the classical body.
Critics were concerned about the effect of East Asian figurines on French art and
taste. Chinese artists seemed to prefer “grotesques over the most regular and intelligent draw-
ings.”28 Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), the philosopher and coeditor with Diderot of
the Encyclopédie, attributed the degeneration of contemporary French painting to “the ridicu-
lous and barbaric taste of our nation for porcelain magots and misproportioned figures from
China. With taste like this, how can one appreciate subject matter that is noble, significant,
and well treated?”29 Tellingly, this assertion is offered to explain why French painting was
deteriorating, but sculpture was not. In early modern formulations of the paragone, or contest
between painting and sculpture, the latter’s serious subject matter, reliance on disegno, and
permanence were often cited as evidence of its superiority over painting.30 If East Asian por-
celain figurines were whimsical, “very badly designed,”31 and fragile, then conceptually they
were closer—and thus more threatening—to painting.

59 boucher’s spirit
 It was not just manual drawing skills (material disegno) that porcelain figu-
rines lacked but also mental disegno: the “genius of invention” evoked by Diderot. In his
Encyclopédie genius was defined in terms of a “force of imagination,” a disposition given to
receiving and recalling ideas with feeling, energy, or the “heat of enthusiasm.”32 The seven-
teenth-century sculptor Michel Anguier defined disegno in similar terms, as “a fire that illu-
minates the understanding, inspires the will, strengthens memory.”33 Even porcelain figurines
produced on European soil were perceived as impervious to the spiritual side of disegno, both
for their association with sugar sculpture and for the semimechanical process with which they
were made.

“Architects of our Desserts”

Porcelain was collected first for its rare materiality, but increasingly in the eighteenth century
for its association with dining services. By the 1740s at Meissen, porcelain figurines were
programmatically conceived as sets meant to decorate the dessert table.34 They replaced and
derived inspiration from sugar sculpture, part of a long tradition of edible sculpture at early
modern European banquets. As the extravagant practice spread beyond princely tables in the
eighteenth century, reusable porcelain figurines proved an attractive and economical substi-
tute for perishable sugar sculpture.35 As such, they were folded into the affairs of the office, or
household pantry—the purview of neither artists nor artisans but of servants and confection-
ers.36 There is even evidence of overlap between artificers of sugar and makers of porcelain:
a pastrycook supposedly participated in modeling porcelain figurines for the famous Swan
Service made at Meissen around 1737.37
Design was an important skill for a confectioner, but it was always secondary to the
gustatory quality of the confection.38 Its purpose was not to transcend the material but to
enhance it. The confectioner was driven not by a creative force sparked by genius, but by an
obligation to satisfy the palates of household guests. To some, this was an absurd mash-up of
art and domesticity. In 1753 a satirical letter in the London periodical The World mocked con-
fectioners’ artistic pretensions:

a celebrated confectioner (so the architects of our desserts still humbly call them-
selves) complained, that after having prepared a middle dish of gods and goddesses
eighteen feet high, his lord would not cause the ceiling of his parlour to be demol-
ished to facilitate their entrée.39

The ironic “architects of our desserts” underscores the incommensurability between the work
of the confectioner and of the liberal artist—architecture, the art of designing but not build-
ing, especially encapsulated the immaterial side of disegno.
By the middle of the century, sugar and porcelain figurines had become interchangeable;
a 1755 manual on table decoration recommended “sugar figures of any type, or Saxon porcelain
figures.”40 Both lacked the spiritual force of disegno. In Diderot’s review of the 1769 Salon—the
official exhibition of works by members of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (the
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture)—he criticized a sculpture submitted by Jean-Baptiste
d’Huez (1729–1793; received by the Académie in 1763) for having “as much force as one of those
porcelain or sugar figures that decorate our tabletops.”41 Sugar and porcelain figurines are distin-
guished from sculpture by a lack of force, a multivalent term that deserves unpacking.42
In the plainest sense, Diderot finds D’Huez’s sculpture, a model for the marble
Enfant courant (Boy running), to lack the energy and verve demanded by the subject matter.
The finished marble (Fig. 5) cuts an awkward, stilted pose: the boy’s stiff arms, capped by
unnaturally contorted wrists and fingers, extend in rigid horizontals. While his left leg flies

60 The Art Bulletin September 2022

 backward, his head and torso lean too far in the opposite direction, failing to align with the
right leg impossibly tasked with supporting the pose. Each body part is positioned to suggest
motion, but as an ensemble they contradict each other, draining the figure of energy and life.
The connoisseur and amateur artist Claude-Henri
Watelet (1718–1786) warned artists that force was
a spiritual energy exceeding the sum of the figure’s
individual body parts: “Do not assume that a heavy
ensemble, a figure with bulging muscles, represents
Hercules. The body of this hero must make us
think that his force resides in his soul, more than
in his frame and forms.”43 Watelet stipulated that
the expression of force depended on an artist with
a “vigorous soul,” conflating the spiritual force of
figure and artist.44
A spiritual continuum between artist and
work also underpinned the use of “force” to refer to
a particular mark or touch. Force in this sense was
connected with ressenti (literally “re-felt”), defined as
“the effect of a reflexive sentiment, which has com-
pelled the artist to give character and force to a mark
or touch.”45 A reflexive sentiment, as opposed to an
involuntary sensation, indicated a secondary level of
consciousness.46 The artist’s experience of sentiment
caused the effect of ressenti, which in turn caused
the effect of sentience in the depicted figure. The
painter and art theorist Michel-François Dandré-
Bardon (1700–1783) identified it as a tool for exter-
nalizing a figure’s internal passion or emotion:

Is not the soul affected by enjoyable senti-

5  Jean-Baptiste d’Huez, Enfant courant (Boy running),
1773, marble, 287/8 × 203/8 in. (73.5 × 52 cm). Musée
des Beaux-Arts d’Arras, France (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Chatsam—own work, CC
BY-SA 3.0)
ments that cause an external and percep-
tible emotion . . . ? The movements of the
muscles are a bit more lively, and forms
on the face much more ressenties. The brow is lightly wrinkled, because the frontal
muscles rise toward the upper part of the head where they originate. The eye, per-
ceptibly open, reveals the entire pupil turned toward the object occupying the gaze.
Thus does Pygmalion look at the work of his chisel. In this pleasurable emotion, the
half-opened mouth lifts its corners toward the cheeks, and makes visible what the
heart experiences.47

Dandré-Bardon’s reference to Pygmalion—the mythical artist whose love for his sculpture
Galatea brings her to life—is apt. In the depiction evoked by Dandré-Bardon, Pygmalion’s
love for Galatea registers through forms “re-felt” on his face—a function of their author’s own
experience of emotion.
The related concept of enthousiasme (enthusiasm), the “life-giving force . . . through
which sculptors in eighteenth-century France animated their works,” has been connected
with Falconet and his marble sculpture Pygmalion and Galatea (Fig. 6), exhibited to wide
acclaim at the Salon of 1763.48 Falconet’s representation emphasizes the mythical sculptor’s
physical manifestations of emotion and calls attention to his own role in creating those physical

61 boucher’s spirit

6  Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Pygmalion and Galatea,
1763, marble, 233/8 × 15¾ × 113/8 (59.5 × 40 × 29
cm). Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, acquired by
Henry Walters, 1924 (artwork in the public domain;
photograph licensed under a CC0 License)
signs.49 Depending on one’s viewpoint, the mass from which Galatea emerges alternates between
heavenly cloud and block of raw marble; responsibility for Galatea’s transformation is shared by
forces both divine and artistic.50 Falconet’s forceful touch—the product of his own enthusiastic
sensibility—animates the sculpture, just as Pygmalion’s passion (chan-
neled through Cupid’s kisses) animates Galatea.
This “life-giving force” made Falconet’s Pygmalion the perfect can-
didate for hypothetical destruction in Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream, written
in 1769—the year D’Huez’s “forceless” sculpture appeared at the Salon.51 In
a fictional dialogue with D’Alembert, Diderot posits that a marble statue
could be made sentient.52 Just as potential energy (“force morte”) can be con-
verted into kinetic energy (“force vive”), latent sensibility could be converted
into active sensibility.53 He explains that one could destroy a sculpture, grind
it into powder, fertilize the powder to create soil, plant seeds in the soil, then
eat and digest the produce.54 As Diderot embarks on this thought experi-
ment, D’Alembert objects to his hypothetical pulverization of “Falconet’s
masterpiece,” presumably Pygmalion and Galatea.55 Not only had Diderot
written extensively (and mostly admiringly) about Falconet’s Pygmalion, but
its subject matter—marble becoming flesh—neatly parallels the philosoph-
ical conceit.56 D’Alembert, ventriloquizing Diderot-art-critic, suggests that
Diderot-philosopher sacrifice a work by D’Huez instead.57 As we have seen,
Diderot-art-critic deemed D’Huez’s work expendable because it lacked force.
Ironically, the animating force that made Pygmalion a successful depiction
of marble becoming flesh—and thus less expendable according to Diderot
the art critic—was precisely what made it better suited to pulverization by
Diderot the philosopher.
Diderot’s judgment of D’Huez in his “Salon of 1769” leans
on sugar and porcelain figurines as a benchmark for lack of force. The
authorial enthusiasm associated with force was incompatible with the domains of confection-
ers and porcelain makers. Even when a professional sculptor created designs for porcelain,
the finished objects were—like sugar figurines—shaped by molds, not by an artist’s forceful
touch. They were typically the result of a complex process involving fragmentation, casting,
and assemblage; and of a long series of rote tasks performed by specialized workers—modeler,
molder, repairer, kiln master, painter, gilder.58 Ultimately, form was impressed on the ceramic
paste not by a singular genius with a “vigorous soul” but by a set of inanimate molds. If force
was expressed by ressenti, and ressenti was the manual index of an artist’s internal sensibility,
then porcelain figurines were doomed to lack force. At the Vincennes-Sèvres manufactory,
however, technological and formal inventions would challenge such assumptions.
The Invention of Biscuit
The Vincennes-Sèvres manufactory was founded in 1740 with the explicit aim of competing
against Meissen.59 Despite efforts to produce “porcelains of the same quality” as those made in
Saxony, the French manufactory did not achieve hard-paste porcelain until after 1768, when
a local source of kaolin was discovered.60 In the meantime, Vincennes-Sèvres produced “soft-
paste porcelain,” which was white like true porcelain but fired at a lower temperature and
could not withstand drastic temperature changes. Following the first appearance of soft-paste
porcelain at a Medici-sponsored porcelain workshop in Florence in 1575, it was produced in
France beginning in the seventeenth century, first at Rouen from 1673, then at Saint-Cloud
from around 1693.61 The soft-paste developed at Vincennes-Sèvres was creamier than the
62 The Art Bulletin September 2022

7  Pierre Blondeau, after François Boucher, Le Porteur
d’oiseaux (Bird vendor), 1752, terracotta, 83/8 × 71/8
× 45/8 in. (21 × 18 × 12 cm). Manufacture et musée
nationaux, Sèvres, France (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Thierry Ollivier, © RMN-Grand
Palais/Art Resource, NY)
8  Vincennes Manufactory, after Pierre Blondeau, after
François Boucher, Le Porteur d’oiseaux, 1752, glazed
soft-paste porcelain, 53/8 × 2½ × 4½ in. (13.5 × 6.3 ×
11.5 cm). Manufacture et musée nationaux, Sèvres,
France (artwork in the public domain; photograph
by Martine Beck-Coppola, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY)
harsh white of hard-paste, and its painted decoration fused with the glaze during firing, cre-
ating an unctuous, milky effect.62 These qualities gave it an aesthetic value of its own, making
it more than a mere substitute for true porcelain. In 1765 an English visitor noted the “most
admirable Beauty & Texture” of this soft-paste, adding that “its Whiteness excells that of the
true Porcelaine.”63 Vincennes-Sèvres could also compete with Meissen in design: it was often
to French Rococo sources that the Saxon manufactory looked for decorative inspiration.64
During a first phase of figural production, from 1746 until around 1751, Vincennes-
Sèvres produced glazed, primarily white, figurines in the general manner of Dehua porcelain, also
known as “white from China” or blanc de Chine, made in the Fujian province of China.65 At the
French manufactory, these statuettes—primarily depicting animals and allegorical or mythological
figures—were conceived as small decorative objects and often adorned with gilt bronze mounts
and porcelain flowers.66 Glazed figurines required two separate firings: the first brought the paste
to the so-called biscuit state; the second followed the application of glaze. The lead-heavy, alkaline
glaze used at Vincennes-Sèvres yielded an especially brilliant shine but had to be applied thickly
lest it devitrify during firing.67 These thick layers of glaze muddled sculptural details and oozed
when fired, pooling in crevices.68 If this was not an urgently felt concern at first, it became more
so following a stylistic and structural shift in figural production at Vincennes-Sèvres.
In the early 1750s, figural production was reoriented to appeal to the Rococo taste for
lavish interiors coordinated around shared ornamental themes and motifs, and eventually to the
desire for sets meant to accompany dinner services.69 It seems that the existing sculptural staff
was deemed unsuited to accommodate this shift. In 1750/51 an administrator noted, “the sculp-
tural workshop lacks graceful models and one must demand more perfection in their work.”70
The production of coherent, homogeneous sets required precise models: since multiple hands
participated in molding and casting the figures within a single set, it was important to minimize
what was left to chance or interpretation. By 1751 most of the first generation of sculpteurs was
gone, and from 1752 a new team was in place.71
The new, highly skilled sculpteurs were required to make relatively finished and leg-
ible clay models (Fig. 7) and to use deeper relief and greater precision when retouching the
figurines in their intermedi-
ate, biscuit state (before the
application of glaze).72 To
achieve a smooth coating of
glaze, the surface had to be
carefully polished, a treatment
that became increasingly art-
ful under these new hands:
eventually, areas of satiny
sheen were juxtaposed with
grainier passages, heightening
the play of light and shadow
on the porcelain’s surface.73
This intense labor, however,
was undermined by the thick
application of unruly glaze,
which obscured or blunted
the sharp details, rigorous
polishing, and subtle surface
effects (Fig. 8). It is assumed
63 boucher’s spirit

9  François Boucher, Le Petit Jardinier (Little gardener),
ca. 1749, graphite and black chalk on paper, 85/8
× 131/4 in. (22 × 33.5 cm). Manufacture et musée
nationaux, Sèvres, France (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Martine Beck-Coppola © RMN-
Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
10  Vincennes Manufactory, after François Boucher, Le
Jeune Suppliant (Little supplicant), 1752/1757–66,
soft-paste biscuit porcelain, 8 × 41/8 × 35/8 in. (20.4
× 10.4 × 9.1 cm). Manufacture et musée nationaux,
Sèvres, France (artwork in the public domain;
photograph by Thierry Ollivier © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY)
that one or more frustrated sculpteur(s) proposed leaving the figurines in their polished, bis-
cuit state.74 The innovation, born of internal politics, technological difficulties, and perhaps
wounded egos, would prove aesthetically significant.
Boucher at Vincennes-Sèvres
Biscuit figurines were put into production by November 21, 1752, when an entry in the
manufactory’s sales register recorded the delivery of “8 enfans de Bouché, biscuit” (or “eight
Boucher children in biscuit”) to the king’s intendant of finances.75 Boucher’s designs had
served as sources at Vincennes-Sèvres—for painted
decoration and glazed figurines—since as early as
1747.76 Translated into porcelain, his images could
contribute to the harmony of a Rococo interior
by joining the numerous other decorative objects,
such as tapestries and furniture, that reproduced his
work.77 His imagery was primarily transmitted to
Vincennes-Sèvres by means of reproductive prints
circulating his drawings and paintings to the wider
public. Decorators or modelers sometimes worked
directly from original works created by Boucher,
usually for other purposes. Occasionally Boucher
made designs explicitly for Vincennes-Sèvres, and
only one of these drawings, Le Petit Jardinier (Little
gardener) (Fig. 9) remains in the factory’s archives.78
The drawing depicts a boy of eight or nine years,
perched in profile atop a small, rounded plot of land.
He leans forward with one leg relaxed, his weight
casually shifted onto a shovel planted vertically
beneath clasped hands. He has the cherubic features
of Boucher’s signature children: a thick mop of
bouncy ringlets, apple-shaped cheeks, and eyes like
saucers. A potted plant and inchoate flora hint at the
boy’s location without breaching his circumscribed
patch of earth, which is isolated from the rest of the
page, evoking a sculptural base. Despite this appar-
ent anticipation of the figure’s translation into three
dimensions, some adjustments were made in the
actual passage from paper to clay. The boy’s shovel
was deleted, its handle presumably too slender to survive in delicate porcelain.79 His pose thus
transformed into one of humble solicitude, and the “little gardener” became a
“little supplicant” (Le Jeune Suppliant) (Fig. 10).
Le Jeune Suppliant was part of the Enfants de Boucher or Enfants Boucher (Boucher
children), the first set of biscuit figurines produced at Vincennes-Sèvres. The group comprised
eight children in contemporary clothing, play-acting at agricultural tasks or penny-ante voca-
tions.80 Each figurine could stand alone or be paired with an implied partner: a bagpiper with
a dancer (Le Joueur de musette and La Danseuse; see Fig. 4), a boy catching birds with a girl
holding a birdcage (Le Porteur d’oiseaux and La Petite Fille à la cage), a boy reaping and a girl
harvesting (Le Moissonneur and La Moissonneuse), and the little supplicant with a “little pin-
afored girl” (La Petite Fille au tablier).81 The The Enfants Boucher were issued first with glaze,
65 boucher’s spirit
then as biscuit figurines based on clay models by Pierre Blondeau—one of the new sculpteurs
hired by the manufactory.82 Boucher was by no means the only artist reproduced in biscuit
at this time—Jean-Baptiste Oudry is a notable example—but most of the biscuits produced
between 1752 and 1756 were Enfants Boucher.83 Between sixty and seventy different biscuit
porcelain figures and figural groups were made after Boucher’s inventions,84 including his
characteristically Rococo fantasies of pastoral couples, many derived from popular contempo-
rary theater.85
The idea that biscuit was conceived to imitate marble does not fit the decision to
debut this innovation with Rococo designs. The frivolous subjects, flickering surface effects,
and fleeting color palette of Rococo painting were thought to be at odds with marble sculp-
ture’s intransigence, permanence, and association with antiquity. According to Diderot, the
laborious and time-consuming process of chiseling hard stone forced sculptors to be more
selective than painters in their choice of subject matter. “The pencil,” he wrote, “is more
licentious than the brush, and the brush more licentious than the chisel.”86 Terracotta and
porcelain were considered more appropriate for what Guilhem Scherf calls “genre sculp-
ture”—sculpture depicting subject matter usually reserved for painting.87 Boucher’s “genre
sculptures” were also well suited to sugar paste, which bore a striking resemblance to biscuit
porcelain, and to the configuration of figurines as sets—children, or offspring, embody the
very notion of difference in repetition. Sets of biscuit figurines were included in many of
the elaborate dinner services designed at Vincennes-Sèvres for princely tables or diplomatic
gifts.88 The 1752 Enfants Boucher series was followed by another series of children designed
by Boucher; these accompanied the bleu céleste (sky blue) dinner service made for Louis XV
between 1753 and 1755.89 Several Boucher figurines were even purchased by the royal pantry in
December 1767 and December 1769.90 Boucher’s representations of youthful innocence must
have complemented the ephemeral delights of the fruits and candies on offer for dessert, and
his depictions of contemporary theatrical characters might have sparked or echoed conversa-
tion at the table.91
In addition to their suitability for the dessert course, Boucher’s designs were consid-
ered especially conducive to reproduction in porcelain. The painter Jean-Jacques Bachelier,
who held a supervisory role at Vincennes-Sèvres, later took credit for soliciting Boucher,
explaining that he thought “nothing would be more pleasing to the public, nor easier to
execute for the type of worker the manufactory had, than to translate into porcelain several
pastoral ideas by M. Boucher.”92 Bachelier cites not only the popular appeal of Boucher’s
designs, but also their suitedness to the artistic abilities of the manufactory’s workers, who
for the most part had trained at the Académie de Saint-Luc.93 The comment perhaps betrays
condescension stemming from Bachelier’s own membership in the rival Académie royale, but
it also suggests that something made Boucher’s designs particularly suited to being copied.
The proliferation of Boucher’s images through eighteenth-century prints and deco-
rative media has been linked to an intrinsic reproducibility, which Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has
called Boucher’s “tact”—his ability to anticipate and accommodate the intervention of other
hands in the marks of his own authorial trace.94 Lajer-Burcharth locates a possible origin for
Boucher’s tact in his early formation making reproductive etchings after Antoine Watteau
(1684–1721), the French painter and draughtsman whose atmospheric evocations of out-
door, aristocratic leisure were an early manifestation of the Rococo. From this work Boucher
learned to insinuate his graphic marks into those of another, while still retaining his own
authorial identity.95 Despite the obvious differences between mark-making in two-dimensional
graphic media and in three-dimensional sculptural media, I would argue that Boucher’s
“tact” contributed to his reproducibility in porcelain. In early modern art theory, the additive

66 The Art Bulletin September 2022

process of modeling in clay or wax (as opposed to the subtractive process of carving marble)
was associated with painting, and was understood as a fundamentally tactile operation of the
fingers.96 According to the 1788 Encyclopédie méthodique, the “flexible material” of a beautiful
model inspired “ease, taste and even le ragoût [a term referring to a lively painterly “stew” of
color]: one delights in feeling and following the various traces of the finger that wandered
over the entire work.”97 Working in the supple and additive medium of clay, the Vincennes-
Sèvres modeleurs would have insinuated their hands into the marks of Boucher’s drawings.
Ultimately, however the finished porcelain figurine was far removed from the clay model in
which authorial “insinuation” occurs.
The process employed at Vincennes-Sèvres was particularly complex and prolonged.
In a first step, the clay model, too delicate to be cast as a whole, was cut into multiple (as many
as fourteen) pieces, from which individual, bivalve molds were made.98 Each mold yielded a
plaster cast, and these were assembled to recreate the figure.99 This plaster model was conserved
for reference, and a second plaster model was produced and again cut into pieces—now in
different places—to create a new set of molds. These molds yielded porcelain casts, which
were assembled and retouched by the acheveur (finisher) or répareur (repairer), who sharpened
details and smoothed out seams, relying on the first plaster model to guide his work.100 Even
this manual, nonmechanical process of retouching was driven not by a “reflexive sentiment”
but by the imperative to imitate the plaster model, a distant descendant of the original model.
In the end, the plaster model has supplanted the clay model as the “original,” and the porcelain
figurines are spatially and temporally divorced from Boucher’s authorial touch.
Scholars have maintained that authorship was not a consideration in the collecting
or viewing of biscuit figurines in these early years and that it would not become one until
the 1760s.101 For at least one influential critic, however, the biscuit “Boucher Children” were
immediately worthy of connoisseurial attention and looked as fresh and forceful as if they
had been sculpted by Boucher himself.

Boucher’s “fertile genius”

Sales records indicate that it took a few years for biscuit to catch on in the commercial pub-
lic: glazed figurines outsold biscuit until 1755, when fifty unglazed “Boucher Children” and
only eleven glazed figurines were sold.102 Despite their relatively slow passage to commercial
success, the biscuit figurines found immediate approval in the art criticism of the abbé Le
Blanc. In his “Observations on the Works of the Members of the Academy of Painting and
Sculpture; exhibited at the Salon du Louvre in 1753,” Le Blanc praises the “grace one finds in
all of these playful children [jeux d’enfants] executed after models by M. Boucher, whose fertile
genius embraces all genres and enriches all the Arts!”103 The term jeux d’enfants connects the
biscuit figurines to Boucher’s fame as a progenitor of many kinds of children, particularly the
naked infants, putti, and geniuses who proliferated in prints after his drawings.104 It has been
argued that the “Boucher Children” functioned as emblems of his artistic identity, embodying
his fruitful capacity for artistic invention.105 His eulogist marveled that Boucher “could have
treated the same subject a thousand times, and his last sketch [pensée] would have been as new,
as naturally expressed as the first.”106 The inherent repetitiveness of the enfant subject might
easily have given way to lifeless simulacra—Diderot lamented that young students squandered
their talents by “stringing together garlands of putti” in emulation of Boucher107—but each of
the master’s children seemed to spring directly and freshly from his mind and hand.
In eighteenth-century formulations of biological reproduction as a metaphor for
sculptural creation, the enthusiastic sculptor performed the roles of mother and father, gen-
erating the body of the child and animating it with the creative spark of life.108 A porcelain

67 boucher’s spirit
cast made by anonymous artisans should have been a “child of the body,” rather than a “child
of the brain.”109 But for Le Blanc, these too were living evidence of Boucher’s creative fecun-
dity—his “fertile genius.” He continued:

Porcelain Figures, cast from molds, seem like Works of Sculpture. I am speaking
here only of those [figures], which, being without glaze, better conserve the spirit
[esprit] of the original, since the shininess and thickness of this type of varnish inev-
itably will remove all of its subtleties. Connoisseurs will surely give preference to the
former. For those who are not [connoisseurs], they offer another advantage . . . we
have begun to decorate our dessert courses with those little Saxon Figures . . . which
substitute for the molded [sugar] pastes that were never eaten anyway: it is without
a doubt that unglazed porcelain, which so strongly resembles sugar, is much better
suited for this purpose.110

Le Blanc contends that the biscuit figurines will appeal to two different audiences, implicitly
addressing porcelain’s uncertain artistic status. Non-connoisseurs will appreciate them as
dessert decoration, connoisseurs as “works of sculpture.” Le Blanc likely refers not to connois-
seurs of porcelain, but of painting and sculpture. A porcelain connoisseur judged the quality
and authenticity of the material, deeming design and decoration secondary, or even distract-
ing, to the study of technical properties.111 The connoisseurs summoned by Le Blanc, in con-
trast, are concerned not with material but with design and authorship.112
Le Blanc writes that connoisseurs will prefer biscuit to glazed figurines because the
former better conserve “the esprit of the original.” This phrase typically referred to a copy’s
ability to capture the essence of an original, although neither Le Blanc nor the typical viewer
would have had access to Boucher’s actual drawings. In a broader sense, esprit could refer to
the mental disposition that determined an artist’s caractère or style.113 The art theorist Roger de
Piles (1635–1709), whose strong advocacy for color over line set the stage for Rococo painting,
defined caractère (character) as an artist’s “way of thinking . . . the seal which distinguishes
him from others and is imprinted on his works like the vivid image of his mind [esprit].”114 Le
Blanc (and presumably the connoisseur) recognizes the imprint of Boucher’s esprit in the bis-
cuit figurines—a testament to the translation skills of the manufactory’s sculptural atelier, and
to Boucher’s reproducibility or “tact,” as theorized by Lajer-Burcharth.
Esprit could also refer more descriptively to a kind of virtuosic mark-making, which
overlapped with the concepts of force and ressenti. According to Watelet, it conjured a
“manner of expressing, without literally describing . . . of making forms perceptible through
summary indications.”115 A trait spirituel (spiritual line) was a “line sometimes abandoned,
sometimes very subtle in prominent and illuminated areas, more strongly ressenti in areas of
recession, even more pronounced in areas of shadow.”116 Watelet qualified his definition with
a warning:

These are strategies which the intelligent artist uses to express what he knows in but
a few lines, and which the merely dexterous artist uses as a sort of charlatanism. The
former satisfies connoisseurs, because it suggests what they know with very little: the
latter charms the most vulgar of amateurs, who takes pride in understanding what
often says nothing, or at least says nothing right or true.117

“Spiritual” expression was certainly associated with Boucher’s drawings and paintings: in
1770 his touch was eulogized as “effortless, elegant, and always spiritual.”118 A spiritual touch
implies an autograph and contingent artistic process: as the artist negotiates the boundary
between immaterial idea and visible form, he manipulates his tool with more or less pressure

68 The Art Bulletin September 2022

or force, testing the limits of intelligibility. This process was antithetical to the mechanical
molding and casting of porcelain figurines, through which a fully realized form was imprinted
on matter with a uniform degree of force.
Le Blanc claims, nonetheless, that the Enfants Boucher seem like “works of sculpture,”
as though they were carved or modeled by hand instead of cast from molds.119 He stipulates
that this applies only to biscuit—not glazed—figurines. In a certain sense, the nuanced sur-
face effects revealed by the absence of glaze were indeed the result of “sculpting.” After the
porcelain pieces were cast and assembled, as we have seen, the repairer carefully finished the
figure by hand. But any evocation of esprit achieved through this process would be superficial,
falling into the second of Watelet’s two categories and offering no real access to the mind of
the original artist, despite what the “most vulgar of amateurs” might think. One might better
understand the biscuit figurines’ quasi-sculptural status in relation to an aesthetic of unfinish.
Le Blanc’s comparison between biscuit and glazed figurines in terms of relative esprit
evokes comparisons between terracotta and marble sculpture in eighteenth-century connois-
seurial discourse. Like preparatory drawings, terracotta models—a taste for which developed
beginning in the 1730s—were thought to provide the most direct and unmediated access to
the mind and caractère of the artist.120 They were associated with the initial moments of cre-
ative inception when the artist’s genius or esprit créateur (creative spirit) was understood to be
most palpable. The connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) wrote that terracotta mod-
els might appeal to a “true connoisseur” even more than finished sculptures, because:

the keen and enlightened eye discovers in [a terracotta model], as in a drawing, the
full spirit of the master—that creative spirit, that blazing and divine fire which ema-
nates from the soul and can so easily be extinguished by an instant of reflection.121

Even for those who lacked the connoisseur’s “enlightened eye,” the relative polish of a sculp-
ture was correlated with its temporal position in the creative process. The summary lines of
sketches and matte, porous surfaces of terracotta models signaled the spontaneity or soft pli-
ability necessary to index an artist’s rapidly firing imagination as he first tries to make visible
a nascent conception. The polish of finished sculptures or paintings, by contrast, signaled
the manual labor and tempered consideration that follow the initial spark and progressively
diminish the creative spirit.122 Shine was associated with the excessively prolonged creative
process of an overzealous sculptor. As the celebrated French sculptor Edmé Bouchardon
(1698–1762) was completing his large plaster model for the equestrian statue of Louis XV, the
engraver and critic Charles-Nicolas Cochin wrote that Bouchardon, “unable to perceive that
the merit of his model’s admirable touch was getting lost, wanted the piece to be filed down,
chiseled everywhere and ultimately finished like a piece of goldsmithery.”123 The comment,
though hyperbolic, correlates shine with distance from the original conception. Overfinishing
was also associated with softened details: in 1808 a critic wrote that “overly finished chiseling
almost always tends to blunt, to soften forms.”124
The connoisseur’s preference for sketches or terracotta models was based on the
assumption that a progressive dissipation of esprit could be mapped onto a visual passage
from matte to polished or shiny; rough to smooth; or pliable to hard. As the art historian
Malcolm Baker has argued, connoisseurs constructed artificial “narrative[s] of invention
and creativity” around such visual characteristics, although these were not always accurate
indicators of an object’s position in the creative process.125 Sculptors might make sketches or
models as a way to communicate with patrons or collaborators, even after work on the final
object was underway.126 Alternatively, a finished work could feature passages of sketchiness
or summary modeling to appeal to the taste for terracotta models. The artist Claude Michel,

69 boucher’s spirit
known as Clodion (1738–1814), renowned for his highly finished terracotta sculptures, at times
alternated finished passages with rougher areas, leaving visible the traces of his tool.127 In this
case, the aesthetic of the sketch does not index the artist’s nascent conception, but rather is a
planned aftereffect.
Le Blanc subtly constructs such an artificial “narrative of creativity,” based on assump-
tions about relative shine and sharpness of details, when he asserts that connoisseurs will prefer
biscuits, which “conserve esprit,” over figurines with glaze, which “will remove all of its sub-
tleties.”128 Biscuit was not only matte like workable clay, but its unreflective surface made for a
striking contrast with the widespread convention of glazing porcelain figurines to achieve an
effect like the “goldsmithery” evoked by Cochin. For those accustomed to the shine and mud-
dled details of glazed porcelain, the appearance of matte, crisp biscuit must have seemed like
peeling back a layer of finish to reveal the object in an earlier stage of the creative process. It
did not necessarily matter that biscuit figurines lacked the sketchiness of a première pensée (first
thought). The absence of glaze signaled a suspension of the process, as though the inevitable
conclusion had been deferred, leaving the figurine in a state of perpetual coming-into-being.
That Le Blanc connected the conservation of esprit with the deferred conclusion of
a work is evidenced by his discussion, in the same 1753 “Observations,” of Michelangelo’s
partially finished marble sculptures known as the Dying Slave (1513) and Rebellious Slave
(1513–16), then in the collection of the Maréchal de Richelieu (now in the Musée du Louvre).
The male figures contort their bodies in an effort to liberate themselves from their fetters;
their mostly finished flesh contrasts with passages of rough-hewn stone, as if to show their
simultaneous liberation from the block of marble itself. Le Blanc writes that connoisseurs will
appreciate the works “no less in what is only sketched than in what is finished. The esprit of
the artist can be seen throughout, and life already exists in the marble that still is only rough-
hewn.”129 Here, esprit is linked to the gradual emergence of life as the sculpted figure comes
into being, summoning Michelangelo’s process of releasing his inner idea, or concetto, from
within the marble block.130 In this case, esprit is not correlated with the fiery initial moments
of inspiration, but rather with a perpetual deferral of making visible the invisible.131
Although biscuit figurines were not partially formed or rough-hewn, Le Blanc’s com-
parison between biscuit and glazed figurines implies a similar narrative of coming-into-being.
The viewer expects to see glaze, but as long as glaze is withheld, the figure appears to remain
unfinished, its conclusion deferred. This, I would argue, is what distinguishes a cast from a
“work of sculpture,” in the sense marshaled by Le Blanc. A cast can only be made once the
original creative process has reached its conclusion: the artist’s concetto or disegno has to have
been made fully visible in order to be mechanically replicated.132 A “work of sculpture,” on the
other hand, implies the potentially ongoing act of sculpting, of physically shaping the mate-
rial according to an immaterial, invisible design in the mind of the artist.
Le Blanc’s artificial creative narrative elides the distinctions between the figurines’
multiple “originals,” as well as the many steps of copying, modeling, cutting, molding, reas-
sembling, and casting that intervened between Boucher’s “spirited” original drawings and the
“sculpted” figurine. He suggests a direct physical connection between the biscuit figures and
what we might call Boucher’s disegno interno (internal design)— Zuccari’s term for the inven-
tive mental disposition made possible by a divine spark.133 With the innovation of biscuit,
porcelain became yet another medium through which Boucher’s “fertile genius” could prolif-
erate, generating Enfants in both body and spirit.
When Falconet arrived at Vincennes-Sèvres, he “corrected” Boucher’s designs to
make them more suitable for reproduction in three dimensions. At the same time, he perpet-
uated and complicated the narrative of Boucher’s creative spirit by displacing its animating

70 The Art Bulletin September 2022

11  Sèvres Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice
Falconet, after François Boucher, Le Petit
Pâtissier (Little pastry chef), 1757–58, soft-paste
biscuit porcelain, 5¾ × 4¾ × 25/8 in. (14.7 × 12.1 ×
6.5 cm). Manufacture et musée nationaux, Sèvres,
France (artwork in the public domain; photograph by
Thierry Ollivier, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
12  Sèvres Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice
Falconet, after François Boucher, Le Marchand de
gimblettes (Gimblettes vendor), 1757/1780–99, hard-
paste biscuit porcelain, 57/8 × 43/8 × 21/4 in. (14.9 × 11
× 5.5 cm). Manufacture et musée nationaux, Sèvres,
France (artwork in the public domain; photograph by
Thierry Ollivier, © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
13  Sèvres Manufactory, after Étienne-Maurice
Falconet, after François Boucher, La Petite Acheteuse
de gimblettes (Girl buying gimblettes), late 18th
century, hard-paste biscuit porcelain, 5 × 75/8 in. (12.7
× 19.2 cm). Stourhead House, Wiltshire, UK (artwork
in the public domain; photograph © National Trust/
David Cousins)
force from graphic mark to figural pose. According to the dominant narrative, Falconet’s
appointment marked a sea change at the manufactory, when painters ceased to dominate
design, and a period of unprecedented sculptural ambition began.134 As we will see, Falconet
built on the sculptural potential already revealed by the conjugation of Boucher’s designs
with the biscuit medium.
Falconet at Vincennes-Sèvres
In July 1757 Étienne-Maurice Falconet became director of the sculptural workshop at
Vincennes-Sèvres.135 During his nine-year tenure, he made weekly visits to the manufactory
and designed some seventy different figurines: allegorical, genre, and theatrical subjects
created specifically for porcelain, as well as reproductions after some of his own marbles.136
His arrival was significant: not only was he a professional sculptor, but he worked in what
the art historian Georges Levitine has called “Louis XV lucidity,” a sweetened classicism
positioned somewhere between Boucher’s ebullient Rococo and the more austere retour à
l’antique (return to antique).137
Given the popularity of Boucher’s figurines, however, it must have seemed financially
prudent to avoid too drastic a change in style.138 Falconet thus reproduced designs by Boucher
for some of his earliest models, including the so-called Enfants Falconet (Falconet children),
a set of sixteen figurines first cast in 1757.139 The chubby Enfants Falconet assume a range of
adult identities: leisurely rural laborer—a grape harvester liberally sampling his vintage or
a girl gathering eggs in her apron; theatrical character—little Sganarelle (a character from
Molière) embracing his bottle of cure-all; or urban peddler—a boy selling gimblettes (a type
of biscuit) or a peripatetic “pastry chef ” offering morsels from his tray (Fig. 11). As with
the Enfants Boucher, these figurines were designed with implicit decorative pairings. The
outstretched arm of Le Marchand de gimblettes (Gimblettes vendor) (Fig. 12) can be oriented
toward that of La Petite Acheteuse de gimblettes (Girl buying gimblettes) (Fig. 13) to enact a
scene of exchange.
71 boucher’s spirit
 Boucher’s drawings for the Enfants Falconet have not survived, nor has any record
of payment for them.140 His authorship is affirmed by a set of reproductive prints (ca.
1761) after twelve of the Enfants Falconet, and by the existence of four counterproofs after
lost drawings by his hand of five figures: the “pastry chef ” (Le Petit Pâtissier), a girl selling
eggs (La Petite Coquetière), the “little Sganarelle” (Le Petit Sganarelle), and (on one sheet)
the gimblettes vendor and buyer (see Fig. 19).141 Comparison between the counterproofs
and corresponding biscuits demonstrates how the drawings were adapted for translation
into three dimensions. Falconet’s vigorous modeling imbued the Enfants with greater energy
and dynamism—one scholar calls them “downright restless”—and the slender, elongated
bodies of Boucher’s preadolescents become round, squat children, their cheeks still bulging
with baby fat.142 While these adaptations contradict the classicizing refinement associated
with Falconet, they likely made Boucher’s designs robust enough to be realized in delicate
porcelain. The spindly gimblettes draped tantalizingly over the edge of the biscuit seller’s
basket, for example, are now thick, compact knots confined to its interior. Although the
porcelain solution loses the element of suggestivo, or evocativeness, in Boucher’s drawings, it
undoubtedly made the figure structurally sound enough to survive firing and use.
It is often assumed that Falconet resented having to lead the manufactory through
this transitional phase.143 The famously irascible and self-righteous sculptor was resistant to
commercial obligations and disliked working from the designs of others, especially painters.144
After creating a sculpture for the château de Crécy after a sketch by Boucher, Falconet
reflected: “Boucher was Boucher, but there were orders from above: consequently, these
were not our most beautiful achievements.”145 By 1758 Falconet relied only sporadically on
Boucher’s images, and the manufactory was already reproducing his own designs, such as his
more classicizing Bather, whose idealized nude body and elegant pose evoke the animated
statue in Pygmalion and Galatea, which would be reproduced in biscuit porcelain by 1763.146
And yet, as late as 1763, Boucher and the Enfants Falconet remained important to the
manufactory’s public identity and, it would seem, to Falconet.

Porcelain in Print
In October 1761 the publisher François Joullain announced the publication of two sets of
prints reproducing twelve of the Enfants Falconet. The sets, entitled the Premier and Deuxième
Livre de Figures d’après les porcelaines de la manufacture royale de France, inventées en 1757, par
Mr. Boucher (First and Second book of figures, after porcelains from the Royal Manufactory
of France, invented in 1757, by M. Boucher) were intended as the first in a series of five.147
The primary goal of the reproductive project, which “sought to convey these charming pieces
with care, and to follow exactly the models, which are in the hands of everyone,” undoubt-
edly was to promote the manufactory’s wares. A second notice published two years later sug-
gests a loftier ambition:

The pieces executed at the Sèvres royal porcelain manufactory are for the most
part worthy of surviving longer than permitted by the fragility of this material.
One has therefore created a suite of prints, which will enable these pieces to out-
live themselves.148

There is a certain absurdity in the notion that the Enfants Falconet needed to “outlive them-
selves.” Not only were they designed for the fundamentally fragile medium of porcelain, but
they were intrinsically reproducible and multiple—cast from molds, they already were copies
of antecedent “original” designs. The figurines were no less capable of preserving the designs
than reproductive prints, which conserve images by means of their multiplicity, not by means

72 The Art Bulletin September 2022


14  Jean-Charles Le Vasseur, after Louis-Simon Boizot,
Epithalame dédié à son altesse royale Monseigneur
le comte d’Artois exécuté en sculpture de biscuit de
porcelaine de France d’après le modèle du Sr. Boizot,
sculpteur du Roi (Epithalamium dedicated to his royal
highness Monseigneur le comte d’Artois executed in
French biscuit porcelain sculpture after the model by
Sr. Boizot, royal sculptor), ca. 1774, engraving, 11½
× 6½ in. (21.2 × 16.5 cm). Bibliothèque nationale
de France, Paris (artwork in the public domain;
photograph © Bibliothèque nationale de France)
of material durability.149 The desire to make the designs transcend “the fragility of this mate-
rial” undermines the assumption that porcelain’s precious materiality was privileged over its
forms and is at odds with the decorative function and tenor of the Enfants Boucher, whose
carefree naivety resonated with the fragility and delicacy of porcelain.
Scholars have made passing mention of the prints, focusing on their documentary
value and attributing them to the manufactory’s desire to publicize its products or pay hom-
age to Falconet.150 Curiously, however, the prints and
announcements make no mention of Falconet, other
than through reference to his son Pierre-Étienne,
who created the drawings from which the prints were
made. Despite the omission, the involvement of Pierre-
Étienne and the plan to reproduce figurines designed
by Falconet the elder suggest that the sculptor played
some role in developing or overseeing this project.
Visual analysis of the prints further attests to the likeli-
hood of the older Falconet’s involvement.
Books of Figures
Despite the claim to “follow exactly” the porcelain
figurines, the Joullain Livres de Figures did not adopt a
strictly documentary approach. In each print, a single
child, enlarged to a naturalistically human scale, poses
on a small patch of rugged terrain. The enlargement,
contextual shift, and centralized singularity of the figures
work against their decorative status. A 1774 print after
Louis-Simon Boizot’s biscuit Marriage employs similar
strategies: the miniature figural group is represented as
a life-size sculpture in an architectural space (Fig. 14).151
But while the later print retains the object’s pedestal,
making it clear that two distinct representational regis-
ters have been brought together, the Joullain prints elide
the porcelain bases, seamlessly merging the figures with
their surrounding landscapes. The representational world
of each Falconet child is continuous with the pictorial
world of each print, effectively erasing the objecthood of
the porcelain figurine.
Many eighteenth-century prints did record
sculptures as physical objects on bases, either against
blank backgrounds or in situ.152 The Livres de Figures
were, for example, roughly contemporaneous with the publication of Le antichità di Ercolano
esposte (Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed). Table XIX of the volume dedicated to statues
depicts four individual objects on pedestals arrayed on generic horizontal surfaces (Fig. 15).
The statues are represented at actual scale, reinforcing their status as distinct objects inhabit-
ing individual representational worlds. Although the documentary approach seems to have
been more typical, that adopted in the Livres de Figures was not unprecedented. Malcolm
Baker has signaled the unusual case of a 1727 set of prints after ivory statuettes by the sculptor
Francis van Bossuit.153 Many of the prints ignore the earthly gravity and objecthood of Van
73 boucher’s spirit
15  Fernando Campana, after Niccolo Vanni, table
19 from Delle antichità di Ercolano, vol. 6, Naples:
Nella Regia Stamperia, 1771. Universitätsbibliothek
Heidelberg (artwork in the public domain; photograph
licensed under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 License)
16  Pierre-Étienne Falconet, after François Boucher,
Frontispiece with Little Boy Holding a Basket,
from Premier Livre de Figures d’après les porcelaines
de la manufacture royale de France (First book of
figures after porcelains from the royal manufactory
of France, devised in 1757, by Mr. Boucher, 1757,
etching and engraving, 95/8 × 75/16 in. (24.5 × 18.5
cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris
Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph licensed under a CC0 License)
Bossuit’s sculptures, placing the figures on cloud formations viewed from below, in a manner
akin to the pictorial language of ceiling painting.154
The compositional terms adopted in the Joullain Livres de figures are consistent with
their eponymous pictorial genre. In the print after Le Petit Pâtissier (Fig. 16), for example,
the little baker is firmly planted in a shallow clearing, bounded by some clumps of wild grass
and fragments of weathered logs. He bends forward, reaching for his tray with one arm while
twisting his torso to offer a treat in the opposite direction. A distressed tree stump echoes his
diagonally extended limbs and marks the outer limit of the foreground. The patch of land
drops off abruptly behind the tree, awkwardly eliding the middle ground. The boy cuts a
stark outline against the large swathe of cloudy sky dominating the background.155 The low
horizon line—barely breaching his buttocks—is characteristic of the “book of figures” or livre
de figures, printed compilations of figural motifs intended for collectors, drawing students, or
decorators of porcelain and other objects.156 Boucher authored several livres de figures, includ-
ing the Collection of Diverse Chinese Figures (Recueil de diverses figures chinoises du cabinet de
Fr. Boucher, peintre du roy, dessinées et gravées par lui-même) (ca. 1738–45). Like the Joullain
Livres de Figures, Boucher’s Collection transformed three-dimensional, decorative objects from
his own collection into two-dimensional, figural prints.157 (It was more common for a livre de
figures to reproduce figural motifs that already existed in graphic form.) The projects diverge,
however, in their modes of constructing origin and authorship.
Boucher’s Invention of 1757
While the Collection of Diverse Chinese Figures clearly identifies its prints as Boucher’s graphic
adaptations of three-dimensional Chinese objects, the Joullain Livres de Figures claim to
reverse-engineer Boucher’s original designs. The prints in the Premier Livre are inscribed
“F. Boucher inv[enit]” at bottom left. Typically, “invenit” referred to the author of the com-
position on which a print was based.158 These prints, however, were not based on Boucher’s
original drawings. As the inscription “Falconet filius del[ineavit]” at bottom right indicates,
74 The Art Bulletin September 2022
17  Pierre-Étienne Falconet, after Sèvres Porcelain
Factory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, after François
Boucher, Drawing, The Youthful Vendor, ca. 1757,
black chalk and white chalk on greenish-blue-gray
paper, 91/4 × 73/8 in. (23.5 × 18.7 cm). Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, Bequest of
Erskine Hewitt, 1938 (artwork in the public domain;
photograph licensed under a CC0 License)
18  Pierre-Étienne Falconet, after Sèvres Porcelain
Factory, after Étienne-Maurice Falconet, after François
Boucher, Young Girl Seated with a Dog, Holding a
Pastry, ca. 1757, black chalk, heightened with white
chalk on laid paper, surrounded by framing lines in
pen and black ink, 93/8 × 73/8 in. (23.7 × 18.8 cm).
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, Presented
by Miss Drummond, 1950 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph © Ashmolean Museum, University
of Oxford)
they reproduce drawings by Pierre-Étienne (Figs. 17, 18), who effectively reimagined
Boucher’s inventions based on the porcelain figurines.159 Boucher is the author function
produced by the prints. It is possible that Boucher’s original drawings were no longer at
the manufactory—that Pierre-Étienne had no choice but to recreate them—although the
existence of the counterproofs weakens this hypothesis.160 In any event, the translation of
drawings by a celebrated draughtsman into the hand of another (far less famous) artist went
against the grain of reproductive printmaking at this moment.
The appearance of the Livres de Figures coincided with widespread efforts in France
to reproduce the physical marks of Boucher’s and other artists’ drawings. Chalk-manner and
wash-manner engraving were among several techniques developed in the 1750s to produce
extremely faithful facsimiles of original drawings.161 These new techniques reproduced not
only the original image but also the physical marks of the draughtsman’s hand, creating the
illusion of immediacy and transparency to the original; writers commented that the prints
could deceive even the most expert eyes.162 These new techniques were frequently used to
reproduce Boucher’s drawings in this period.163 The ability to replicate the idiosyncrasies of an
artist’s marks was ever important as the discourse of connoisseurship was codifying the link
between authorship and physical trace.164
Only a year or two after the Livres de Figures were published, a wash-manner engrav-
ing after Boucher’s drawing of the “Biscuit Seller” and “Girl Buying Biscuits” was created by
Louis-Marin Bonnet (1736–1793) (Fig. 19).165 Here, the inscription “Boucher fecit” identifies
Boucher as author of both the conceptual design and its physical realization in graphic form.
The print replicates the loose, calligraphic character and sketchlike economy of Boucher’s
marks. The figures are not defined so much as suggested by fitful or tentative lines, demon-
strating Boucher’s mastery of the trait spirituel (spiritual line) or touche (touch). While touche
is usually associated with effects of brushwork, Watelet also applied the term to the delineation
of a figural form in a way that responds to “accidents or observed effects produced by light” by
breaking up the uniformity of line or pressing harder in some areas than others.166 Touche can
75 boucher’s spirit

19  Louis-Marin Bonnet, after François Boucher, Le
Marchand de gimblettes, ca. 1763, etching, 103/8 ×
13¼ in. (26.2 x 33.5 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris,
Rothschild Collection (artwork in the public domain;
photograph by Tony Querrec © RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY)
be observed in Boucher’s delineation of the biscuit seller’s hat: a bold (or ressenti) figure eight
describes the brim, then disappears along its upper edge, leaving the task of definition to a few
frenetic squiggles. A rhythmic pattern of unevenly weighted dashes tersely articulates the edge
of his left sleeve, hinting at the illusion
of three-dimensionality while acknowl-
edging the grainy surface of the two-di-
mensional paper.
While the wash-manner engrav-
ing diligently replicates Boucher’s tou-
che, the Livres de Figures prints react
against it. Deep modeling shapes the
bodies of the gimblettes vendor and his
customer (Fig. 20), whose solid arms,
thick neck, and bulging double chin are
dense networks of cross-hatched lines
and parabolas. Her skirt expands from
a loose configuration of velvety black
tendrils into a voluminous mountain
of creases and folds. This intense play
of light and shadow is absent from the
rest of the composition—the topogra-
phy of her costume is far more rugged
and complex than the gently sloping
ridges and hillocks of the surrounding
landscape or flattened atmospheric
backdrop. Bold outlines around the bodies reinforce this contrast, establishing a stark distinc-
tion between figure and ground. If the modeling of the figures makes Boucher’s designs more
sculptural, the rigid contours insist on their two-dimensionality. This unusual negotiation
between two- and three-dimensionality might be illuminated by Falconet the elder’s written
reflections on the relationship between painting and sculpture.
Falconet and the Contest between Painting and Sculpture
As a practicing eighteenth-century sculptor and prolific writer, Falconet was exceptional.167
His writings on art were extensive, antagonistic, and often contradictory. They engaged with
key artistic contests: between painting and sculpture, ancients and moderns, and disegno and
colore.168 By the time Falconet was born, the latter contest had effectively been decided in
favor of color, and this led to the sundering of dessein from dessin.169 Drawing was allied with
sculpture and recast as a primarily mechanical skill, while color (and painting) became associ-
ated with genius and invention.170 In the contest between painting and sculpture, it was thus
the former that tended to prevail in eighteenth-century thought, by requiring mental rather
than physical labor.171
Falconet addressed this paragone (contest) in his “Reflections on Sculpture,” naturally
advocating for the superiority of his own medium and for the primacy of line, or disegno,
while also acknowledging the value of painterly knowledge for a sculptor. Falconet’s take
on the question of relative difficulty was unusual.172 Proponents of painting often cited the
greater number of technical elements, including color and composition, the painter had to
master. Falconet turned this argument on its head, positing that sculpture was more diffi-
cult because it lacked those extra tools.173 Painters could use color, for example, as a crutch to
76 The Art Bulletin September 2022

20  Pierre-François Tardieu, after Pierre-Étienne
Falconet, after François Boucher, Little Girl Playing
with a Dog, from Deuxième Livre de Figures
d’après les porcelaines de la manufacture royale
de France (Second book of figures after porcelains
from the royal manufactory of France), after 1757,
etching and engraving, 93/4 × 71/2 in. (24.7 × 19
cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris
Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph licensed under a CC0 License)
compensate for their shortcomings in the more difficult elements shared by both arts, such as
figural expression and circumscription. “The proof,” he wrote:
can be found in some of Rubens’s painted women,
who, despite their Flemish and incorrect character,
will always seduce through the charm of their color-
ing. Execute them in sculpture using the same style of
drawing, and that charm will be considerably dimin-
ished, if not entirely destroyed.174
Painters could also deflect attention from weakly articu-
lated figures by enhancing the overall composition, adding
background scenery, ornament, or more figures. But when
a sculpture is viewed outdoors or in an architectural setting,
Falconet warned, it must detach itself from its surroundings
and “announce itself unequivocally, from as far away as one
can distinguish it.”175 While paintings were judged “by means
of the whole,” the sculptor “has but one word to say; this word
must be full of energy.”176 Moreover, while the sculptor could
not rely on painterly effects to compensate for weak drawing,
he still required knowledge of such effects to convincingly ren-
der flesh and drapery, anticipate ambient lighting, and convey
sentiment and life through surface modulation.177
The Livres de Figures prints utilize elements from the
painter’s toolkit, such as the addition of background elements
or the intense play of light and shadow across the surface of
the figures’ bodies. The rigorous contours circumscribing each
figure, meanwhile, demonstrate that any knowledge of paint-
erly skill is superseded by the mastery of disegno. As Falconet
prescribed, the figures “detach” themselves from their outdoor
settings, and they remain the sole loci of “energy.” It is thus
by means of a pictorial principle—circumscription—that the prints demonstrate mastery of
the singular logic of sculpture.178 They represent the sculptural three-dimensionality of the
figurines in a pictorial mode. And yet, even this pictorial conjugation of sculpture is the work
of Pierre-Étienne’s hand, not Boucher’s. If Boucher invented neither the compositions nor
the physical drawings reproduced in the Joullain prints, then how are we to understand the
inscription “Boucher invenit”?
Boucher Invenit
Falconet’s distinction between inventing a composition and inventing a single figure—
between saying “one word” and an entire sentence—is crucial to understanding Boucher’s
role in the Livres de Figures. A comparable use of the term “invenit” can be found in a print
by Marcantonio Raimondi after Michelangelo. The print identifies Michelangelo as inventor
and Raimondi as engraver, and yet it is based on Raimondi’s own drawing of a single figure
extracted from Michelangelo’s cartoon for his never completed fresco, the Battle of Cascina
(1504). For Michelangelo, as Michael Cole has shown, invention referred not to a pictorial
composition but to a figure, “and not even . . . the represented character so much as . . . the
naked pose.”179 A similar argument has been made about Boucher’s talent as a progenitor of
jeux d’enfants. His infants’ bodies were virtually identical—what distinguished them were
77 boucher’s spirit
their poses: the various configurations of their limbs or orientations of their torsos and heads.
Invention for Boucher was “formal rather than typological.”180 Still, if figural invention
for Michelangelo was a binding force of circumscription181—something left to Falconet in
“the Livres de Figures”—then what did Boucher invent?
The Enfants Boucher—emblems of his “fertile genius”—could be seen as descen-
dants of spiritelli—the pneumatic sources of energy believed to animate the human body
in Renaissance thought.182 Cole has linked demonic or spiritual possession of the body to
sculptural invention through modeling: like the sculptor who applies tactile force on ductile
material to compel a figure into a pose, a spirit could possess a body, forcing its movements
and contortions.183 In each of the Livres de Figures prints, Boucher’s invention is the pose—the
spiritual or artistic force that animates and shapes the body.
If the wash-manner print performed Boucher’s spiritual touch, his touche, the Livres
de Figures prints performed his spiritual force. This performance relies on the idea that one
could look through each biscuit figurine to imagine Boucher’s original invention—not his
physical dessin, but rather his conceptual dessein, or disegno. Boucher’s spiritual marks on
the surface attempted to convey the figural movement he had already conceived in his mind;
in the absence of those graphic marks, Boucher’s authorship is conceived as the animating
force itself. Like Le Blanc’s discussion of the Enfants Boucher, the prints reimagine the artistic
process, eliding its many layers of fragmentation, assemblage, and mediation to restore unity
and force to the original conception. By leaving Boucher’s inventions in an immaterial state,
the prints suggest that the porcelain figurines are not fully reducible to an already visible
model and that they are conceptually autonomous—independent from the material of por-
celain. They reproduce the Enfants Falconet not as porcelain figurines but as, pace Panofsky,
“materialized conceptual forms.”

Spectral Paternity
It was as materialized conceptual forms that Boucher’s biscuit figurines were likened to
ancient paintings from Herculaneum—the unexpected juxtaposition with which I began.
While the Herculaneum prints sought to reinforce the physical “thingness” of the ancient
paintings, defining them as property in the collection of the King of Naples, the search for
tangible, exchangeable property in the Joullain Livres de Figures comes up empty. When we
follow textual and visual cues to trace the origin of the printed images, we slip from print to
drawing to porcelain to clay model to “Boucher”: a sign with no physical referent, an author
function meant to conjure physical absence rather than presence. While the “Boucher”
produced by the biscuit figurines was constituted by the idiosyncrasies of his touch and the
boundless depths of his genius, this “Boucher” acknowledges that fertile genius only by clos-
ing it, making knowable and finite what was in his mind. If the visibility of the child implies
the death of the named father/author, it also implies the proliferation of the unnamed:
Falconet. It is his son Pierre-Étienne (author of the actual drawings reproduced in print) who
dutifully mediates between Boucher’s lost, abstract designs and the concrete reproductive
technology that will carry them backward and forward in time: to the antiquity of Hercula-
neum, and to a future far beyond the material life of biscuit porcelain.

susan wager is assistant professor of art history at the University of New Hampshire, Durham. Her current book
project examines Madame de Pompadour, François Boucher, and artistic reproduction [Department of Art and Art
History, Paul Creative Arts Center, 30 Academic Way, Durham, NH 03824, susan.wager@unh.edu].

78 The Art Bulletin September 2022

NOTES
An early version of this article was presented at the 2018
meeting of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and
Architecture in Dallas. I am grateful for the encourage-
ment and productive comments from the panel organizers
Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek, and audience mem-
bers Malcolm Baker, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, and Andrei
Pop. I am also grateful to the Antiquarian Society of the
Art Institute of Chicago, where I presented some of this
work in 2019. In Chicago a remark from the boundlessly
brilliant Emerson Bowyer had a profound effect in shaping
the article’s subsequent development; I am deeply indebted
to him. Support for the research presented here came from
the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, where I
held the Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellowship from 2012
to 2014. I am grateful for the Center’s support and for the
formative discussions of this material with my colleagues
there, especially S. Hollis Clayson. The article builds on
work begun while I was a graduate student at Columbia
University; I am grateful to Anne Higonnet, Jonathan
Crary, and Michael Cole for their comments during those
early stages, and to Jessica Maratsos for reading a draft
during the later stages. The University of New Hampshire
generously provided financial support for the images repro-
duced here; Ben Cariens and Scott Clements were essential
to making that happen. I thank Milette Gaifman, Lillian
Lan-ying Tseng, the two anonymous reviewers, and Nick
Geller for helping me to sharpen the article’s focus. My
deepest thanks are to Lorenzo Buonanno for generously,
supportively, and tirelessly reading many drafts along the
way.
1. See introduction by Alex Potts in Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry
Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute,
2006).
2. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Anmerkungen über die
Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Dresden 1767. Texte
und Kommentar, ed. Adolf H. Borbein and Max Kunze
(Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2008), 34. The comment
was included in the posthumous 1776 edition of the
History. See also Michael Yonan, “Porcelain as Sculpture:
Medium, Materiality, and the Categories of Eighteenth-
Century Collecting,” in Sculpture Collections in Europe
and the United States 1500-1930: Variety and Ambiguity, ed.
Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist (Leiden, the Netherlands:
Brill, 2021), 174–93.
3. See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, “Thoughts on
the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and the
Art of Sculpture,” in Johann Joachim Winckelmann on
Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, trans. David Carter
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 54. See also
Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2019), 153–54.
4. Winckelmann, Anmerkungen, 34. Translation from
Yonan, “Porcelain as Sculpture,” 192.
5. Winckelmann, History, 351.
6. For the problematic status of smallness in eighteenth-
century art theoretical discourse, see Anne Perrin Khelissa,
“Menace sur le ‘grand’ art: Le peuple des magots et des
statuettes en porcelaine au siècle des Lumières,” in Penser
le ‘petit’ de l’Antiquité au premier XXe siècle. Approches
textuelles et pratiques de la miniaturisation artistique, ed.
Sophie Duhem, Estelle Galbois, and Anne Perrin Khelissa
(Lyon: Fage, 2017), 88–98.
7. Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts
(February 1762), 568. The prints were first announced
in the October 5, 1761, issue of L’Avantcoureur. The
Mémoires reprints the original announcement before
commenting, “we add to this announcement, which is
from the seller, that the subjects are in the taste of those
pulled from Herculaneum.” (“Nous ajoutons à cette
Annonce qui est du Marchand, que ces sujets sont dans le
goût de ceux tirés de Herculanum.”)
8. Ibid.
9. For connoisseurship, see Kristel Smentek, Mariette and
the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century
Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014). For author-
ship, see David Pullins, “The Individual’s Triumph: The
Eighteenth-Century Consolidation of Authorship and
Art Historiography,” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (June
2017): 1–26.
10. The inferior artistic status of porcelain figurines is
often dated to the rise of Neoclassicism. See Catriona
MacLeod, “Sweetmeats for the Eye: Porcelain Miniatures
in Classical Weimar,” in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe
and Visual Culture, ed. Evelyn K. Moore and Patricia
Anne Simpson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 41–72; and
Matthew Martin, “Models and Multiples: Eighteenth-
Century European Porcelain Sculpture,” in Congress of
the International Committee for the History of Art 2012,
Nuremberg, Germany (July 2012), 944–48.
11. For etymology, see the conchological entry for
“Porcelaine” in the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné
des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot
and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago:
ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), ed.
Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, https://artflsrv03
.uchicago.edu/philologic4/encyclopedie0521/navigate
/13/264/. According to Marie Delcourt (Oreste et Alcméon,
1959) the Greek χοιρος and Latin porculus denoted both
“pig” and “vagina.” The Italian porcellana, however, is
thought to derive from the shell’s resemblance to the
female genitalia of pigs in particular. See also MacLeod,
“Sweetmeats,” 42; and Christine A. Jones, Shapely Bodies:
The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013).
12. For porcelain and consumer desire, see Stacey Sloboda,
“Porcelain Bodies: Gender, Acquisitiveness, and Taste
in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Material Cultures
1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed.
Alla Myzelev and John Potvin (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2009), 19–36. For a recent consideration of how porce-
lain’s materiality paradoxically enabled and thwarted its
potential to become sculpture, see Yonan, “Porcelain as
Sculpture,” 174–93.
13. Erwin Panofsky, “Original and Facsimile
Reproduction,” trans. Timothy Grundy, RES 57/58
(Spring/Autumn 2010): 335. Originally published in 1930
as “Original und Faksimilereproduction.”
14. Ibid. Although exceptional, some French porcelain
figures were in fact also cast in bronze. See Tamara Préaud,
“Sculptures en porcelaine de Sèvres et bronze doré au
dix-huitième siècle,” The French Porcelain Society Journal
3 (2007): 95.
79 boucher’s spirit
15. There is evidence that biscuit porcelain figures were
produced in China before this date. Examples were
known in France but were extremely rare. Tamara Préaud,
“Eighteenth-Century Sèvres Biscuit Sculpture,” The
International Ceramics Fair and Seminar (London, 2002),
50n22.
16. For a recent example, see Suzanne L. Marchand,
Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2020), 146–47.
17. See for example Marie-Noëlle Pinot de Villechenon,
ed., Falconet à Sèvres 1757–1766, ou l’art de plaire, exh.
cat. (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux,
2001), 9; and MacLeod, “Sweetmeats,” 41. The analogy
between biscuit and marble has recently been ques-
tioned but only in passing. See Préaud, “Sculptures en
porcelaine,” 94; and Anne Perrin-Khelissa, “Comment
orne-t-on la sculpture en biscuit de Vincennes-Sèvres
au XVIIIe siècle? Figures en porcelaine; ornements en
bronze,” in Questions d’ornements, XVe–XVIIIe siècles, ed.
Ralph Dekoninck, Caroline Heering, and Michel Lefftz
(Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013), 229.
18. See for example Guilhem Scherf, “Le biscuit est une
sculpture: sculpteurs à Sèvres,” in La Manufacture des
Lumières: La sculpture à Sèvres de Louis XV à la Révolution,
ed. Tamara Préaud and Guilhem Scherf, exh. cat. (Dijon,
France: Éditions Faton, 2015), 68–69; and Perrin-Khelissa,
“Comment orne-t-on,” 224.
19. Recently they were interpreted as a “self-conscious
dialectic between ‘sculptural’ material and decorative
tone.” Martina Droth, “Truth and Artifice: Transforming
the Real with Sculptural Form,” in Taking Shape: Finding
Sculpture in the Decorative Arts, ed. Martina Droth, exh.
cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009), 15.
20. See Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory,
trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York: Icon, 1968), 242n22.
21. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Disegno,” in Dictionary of
Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin
et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 224–26.
22. See Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of
Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010).
23. See Julie Emerson, Jennifer Chen, and Mimi Gardner
Gates, Porcelain Stories: From China to Europe, exh. cat.
(Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2000), 16–23.
24. See Alden Cavanaugh and Michael E. Yonan, eds.,
The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 5.
25. See Glenn Adamson, “Rethinking the Arcanum:
Porcelain, Secrecy, and the Eighteenth-Century Culture
of Invention,” in ibid., 19–38; and Sarah Richards,
Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised
Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999),
10–29.
26. Denis Diderot, “Philosophie des Chinois,” in
Œuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 14, Dictionnaire ency-
clopédique, ed. Jacques Naigeon (Paris, 1821), 2:286.
27. Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, “The Reign of Magots and
Pagods,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 37 (2002): 177–97.
28. Jacques-Philibert Rousselot de Surgy, Mélanges intéres-
sans et curieux, ou abrégé d’histoire naturelle, morale, civile,
et politique de l’Asie, l’Afrique, l’Amérique, et des Terres
Polaires (Yverdon, Switzerland, 1765), vol. 5, 117–18.
29. “École,” in Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie,
5:334.
30. See Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot: An Essay
on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the
Modern Age, trans. Chris Miller (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute, 2008).
31. Dictionnaire du citoyen, ou abrégé historique, théorique
et pratique du commerce (Paris, 1761), vol. 2, 208.
32. “Génie,” in Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie,
7:582.
33. Michel Anguier, “Le grand dessein” (lecture delivered
at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on 2
October 1677). Transcribed from manuscripts held in the
École nationale (ms. 174) and the Bibliothèque nationale
de France (ms. N.a.f. 10936, fol. 257–64) in Jacqueline
Lichtenstein and Christian Michel, eds., Conférences
de l’Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, vol. 1,
1648–1681 (Paris: École normale supérieure des beaux-arts,
2006), 2:635.
34. Clare Le Corbeiller, “Porcelain as Sculpture,” The
International Ceramics Fair and Seminar (1988): 24.
35. Ivan Day, “Sculpture for the Eighteenth-Century
Garden Dessert,” in Food in the Arts: Proceedings of the
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1998, ed. Harlan
Walker (Devon: Prospect Books, 1999), 59–61; and Selma
Schwartz, “A Feast for the Eyes: 18th-Century Documents
for the Creation of a Dessert Table,” The International
Ceramics Fair and Seminar (2000): 28–35. Porcelain
was already associated with the dessert course: the term
pourcelaine referred to any dish bearing stacks of fruit, no
matter the material. Howard Coutts, The Art of Ceramics:
European Ceramic Design 1500–1830 (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2001), 78–79. For the relation-
ship between the forced labor of enslaved peoples that
brought sugar to eighteenth-century tables and the ornate
table decoration that erased or fetishized that labor, see
Adrienne L. Childs, “Sugar Boxes and Blackamoors:
Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain,” in
Cavanaugh and Yonan, Cultural Aesthetics, 159–77.
36. There are reports of renowned sculptors designing
edible sculpture, such as Giambologna in seventeenth-
century Italy. See Le Corbeiller, “Porcelain,” 23. If this
occurred in eighteenth-century France, it would have
been the exception rather than the rule.
37. Coutts, Art of Ceramics, 95.
38. See Joseph Gilliers, Le Cannameliste française, ou
Nouvelle instruction pour ceux qui désirent d’apprendre
l’office (Nancy, 1751), 73.
39. Adam Fitz-Adam, The World 6 (February 8, 1753),
35. “Adam Fitz-Adam” was the pseudonym used by the
English writer Edward Moore (1712–1757).
40. Joseph Menon, Les soupers de la Cour, ou L’art de tra-
vailler toutes sortes d’alimens, pour servir les meilleures tables,
suivant les quatre saisons (Paris, 1755), 1:16.
41. Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1769,” in Œuvres de Denis
Diderot, vol. 1, 16: Salons (Paris: Brière, 1821), 3:152.
42. See Claude-Henri Watelet, Dictionnaire des arts
de peinture, sculpture et gravure (Paris, 1792), 2:357–58.
Watelet notes that force is one of several terms that are
“absolutely figurative in the language of art, and of which
the meaning is, for this reason, always a bit vague.” All of its
usages, however, “relate to energy, and energy belongs to the
soul.” This is the expanded, posthumous edition of Watelet’s
“Dictionnaire des beaux-arts” (Dictionary of fine arts).
43. Claude-Henri Watelet, Encyclopédie méthodique.
Beaux-arts (Paris, 1788–1791), vol. 1, 315.
44. Ibid.
45. Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, vol. 2, Quatrième
Édition (Paris, 1762). Dictionnaire de l’Académie française,
4th ed. (Paris, 1762), vol. 2, 619. 
46. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an
Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning
into Moral Subjects (London, 1739), vol. 1, 7–8.
47. Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, Traité de peinture,
suivi d’un essai sur la sculpture (Paris, 1765), vol. 1, 63.
48. Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and
Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 175. Falconet’s Pygmalion
and Galatea was later reproduced as a biscuit porcelain group.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 174–76.
51. Le Rêve de d’Alembert was written in the summer of
1769 but not published until 1830.
52. Denis Diderot, “Entretien entre D’Alembert
et Diderot,” in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 2,
Philosophie, ed. J. Assézat (Paris, 1875), 2:105–21.
53. Translation adapted from Denis Diderot, Rameau’s
Nephew and Other Works, trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph
H. Bowen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
2001), 92–93.
54. Diderot, “Entretien,” 107.
55. Ibid., 108.
56. Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1763,” in Salons: Textes
choisis, présentés, établis et annotés par Michel Delon (Paris:
Gallimard, 2008), 95–97. Commentary on the thought
experiment typically identifies the statue as Pygmalion and
Galatea. For Falconet’s Pygmalion and eighteenth-century
materialist philosophy, see Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion
Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 137–48. For
the Pygmalion myth as pantomime, see Sheriff, Moved by
Love, 181–200; and Stochita, Pygmalion Effect, 118–26.
57. Diderot, “Entretien,” 108.
58. Len and Yvonne Adams, Meissen Portrait Figures
(Leicester, UK: Magna, 1992), 11.
59. For the history of the manufactory’s founding, see Antoine
d’Albis, “Les premières années de la Manufacture de porce-
laine de Vincennes,” Faenza 70, nos. 5–6 (1984): 479–92.
60. On July 24, 1745 a royal decree granted exclusivity
to the manufactory to “make Saxon-style porcelain” and
cited “the desire one has had to make in France porcelains
of the same quality as those that are made in Saxony.” (“le
80 The Art Bulletin September 2022
désir que l’on a eu de fabriquer en France des porcelaines
de même qualité que celles qui se font en Saxe.”) Decree,
“Arrêt du Conseil d’État du roi, portant privilège de fab-
riquer de la porcelaine façon de Saxe, du 24 juillet 1745,”
Series O1 1057, Archives nationales, France.
61. See Emerson et al., Porcelain Stories, 24–30; and
Bertrand Rondot, ed., Discovering the Secrets of Soft-Paste
Porcelain at The Saint-Cloud Manufactory, ca. 1690–1766
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
62. Carl Christian Dauterman, The Wrightsman Collection,
vol. 4, Porcelain (New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art, 1970), 159; and Antoine d’Albis, “The History of
Innovation in European Porcelain Manufacture and the
Evolution of Style: Are They Related?” in Technology and
Style, ed. W. D. Kingery (Westerville, OH: American
Ceramic Society, 1986), 397–412.
63. Rev. William Cole, A Journal of my Journey to Paris
in the Year 1765, ed. Francis Griffin Stokes (London:
Constable & Co. Ltd., 1931), 232–33.
64. Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, “Meissen et la France avant
et après la guerre de Sept Ans: artistes, espionnages et
commerce,” in Art français et Art allemande au XVIIIe
siècle: Regards croisés, ed. Patrick Michel (Paris: École du
Louvre, 2008), 61–99.
65. Tamara Préaud, “La sculpture à Vincennes ou l’in-
vention du biscuit,” Sèvres: Revue de la Société des Amis du
Musée National de Céramique 1 (1992): 30–37. Polychrome
enameled figurines inspired by Meissen were also pro-
duced during these early years, but relatively rarely. See
Antoine d’Albis, “La Marquise de Pompadour et la manu-
facture de Vincennes,” Sèvres 1 (1992): 59.
66. Préaud, “La sculpture,” 31.
67. Antoine d’Albis, Traité de la porcelaine de Sèvres
(Dijon, France: Éditions Faton, 2003), 114.
68. Ibid. According to the chemist Jean Hellot, glaze was
applied with brushes precisely to avoid this problem. See
Tamara Préaud, Porcelaines de Vincennes: Les origines de
Sèvres (Paris: Éditions des musées nationaux, 1977), 14.
69. See Tamara Préaud and Antoine d’Albis, La Porcelaine
de Vincennes (Paris: Éditions Adam Biro, 1991), 89; Préaud,
Préaud, “L’atelier de sculpture. Histoire, organisation et
production,” in Préaud and Scherf, Manufacture, 21.
70. Quoted in Préaud, “La sculpture,” 34.
71. The broad term sculpteur was used continuously from
1746 and seems to have encompassed model-makers (mod-
eleurs) as well as finishers (acheveurs and after 1753, répa-
reurs). See Carl Christian Dauterman, Sèvres Porcelain:
Makers and Marks of the Eighteenth Century (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 253–56.
72. D’Albis, Traité, 114.
73. Perrin-Khelissa, “Comment orne-t-on,” 226.
74. The innovation also reduced labor costs and risk
by eliminating the second firing. Préaud, Porcelaines de
Vincennes, 14. Jean-Jacques Bachelier would later claim
to have proposed the biscuit idea in response to the
manufactory’s inability to rival the polychrome figurines
of Meissen. Cartons Y36–37, Archives de la Manufacture
nationale de Sèvres (AMNS). Scholars have questioned
Bachelier’s account, since polychrome figures were rarely
attempted during this period. See Préaud and D’Albis,
Porcelaine de Vincennes, 89.
75. Registre Vy, AMNS. The figurines were sold for 48
livres each. Since the register begins with October 1,
1752, it is possible that biscuit figurines had been sold
earlier. D’Albis (Traité, 114n1) finds this unlikely. The
sale of “two Vincennes figures in white” (“deux figures de
Vincennes en blanc”) to a Madame Camuset for 96 livres
was recorded by the marchand-mercier Lazare Duvaux on
August 8, 1752. Livre-Journal de Lazare-Duvaux, march-
and-bijoutier ordinaire du roy, 1748–1758 (Paris, 1873),
vol. 2, no. 1192. Based on the price, Préaud posits that
these were biscuit figures. Préaud and D’Albis, Porcelaine
de Vincennes, no. 179.
76. See Anne-Marie Belfort, “L’Œuvre de Vielliard
d’après Boucher,” Cahiers de la céramique, du verre et des
arts du feu 58 (1976): 6–35; Rosalind Savill, “François
Boucher and the Porcelains of Vincennes and Sèvres,”
Apollo 115 (March 1982): 162–70; Antoinette Faÿ-Hallé,
“The Influence of Boucher’s Art on the Production of the
Vincennes-Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory,” in François
Boucher 1703–1770, ed. Alastair Laing, exh. cat. (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 345–50; and
Françoise Joulie, “Le rôle de François Boucher à la manu-
facture de Vincennes,” Sèvres 13 (2004): 33–52.
77. See Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch:
Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2018); and Edith A. Standen, “Country
Children: Some Enfants de Boucher in Gobelins Tapestry,”
Metropolitan Museum Journal 29 (1994): 111–33.
78. On December 31, 1754, Boucher received 300 livres
“for all the drawings he has furnished to the manufactory
up to the present.” On April 8, 1756, he received 485
livres “for all the drawings he has furnished.” Carton F2,
Liasses 2–3, AMNS. Le Petit Jardinier is presumed to be
one of the “13 [drawings] by M. Boucher of children”
mentioned in the manufactory’s inventory from October
1, 1752. Carton I7, AMNS. On its verso, an inscription
from 1750–54 reads: “Dessein de M. Boucher apartenans
à la manufacture de Vincennes ce 23 août 1749.” Alastair
Laing has found it “too precise, too unambiguous” to be
Boucher’s hand. Alastair Laing, “Madame de Pompadour
et ‘les Enfants de Boucher,’” in Madame de Pompadour
et les arts, ed. Xavier Salmon, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion
des musées nationaux, 2002), 44. Arguing in favor of
Boucher’s authorship, Françoise Joulie cites, among
other things, the drawing’s pentimenti and areas of free
handling, questioning only the arbitrary white chalk high-
lights at the bottom of the page, perhaps later additions or
accidental transfers from another drawing. Joulie, “Le rôle
de François Boucher,” 42, no. 14.
79. Préaud and Scherf, Manufacture, n. 14. A recent essay
by Alicia Caticha (“Porcelain and Sculpture Networks in
Eighteenth-Century Paris,” The French Porcelain Society
Journal 8 [2020]: 139–61), seeking to decenter Boucher
and Falconet in the history of porcelain’s elevation to the
status of a “liberal art,” cited this modification as evidence
of artistic creation in its own right. Crucially, however,
the translation involves the kind of practical concern and
knowledge specific to materials that distinguished the
mechanical from the liberal arts and the Académie de
Saint-Luc from the Académie royale de peinture et sculp-
ture. The modification, like all of the work performed by
modelers at Vincennes-Sèvres, involves adaptation from
an existing visual model, not invention from nature.
80. Standen, “Country Children,” 112. As Anne Billon
has noted, agricultural vocations are depicted here
and in other figurines as “charming children detached
from a painful and laborious reality.” (See Préaud and
Scherf, Manufacture, 81.) These porcelain fantasies of rural
labor performed by white bodies also were detached from
the realities of the forced labor by enslaved peoples that
brought sugar and sugar sculpture to the tables they deco-
rated. This is a topic in need of further scholarly attention,
but one that lies beyond the scope of this text. For orna-
mental figures of black bodies on the eighteenth-century
dessert table, see Childs, “Sugar Boxes,” passim. See also
Kara Walker’s brilliant sculptural installation “A Subtlety,
or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” (2014).
81. Émile Bourgeois, Le biscuit de Sèvres au XVIIIe siè-
cle (Paris: Goupil, 1909), vol. 2, 4. The attributions of
La Petite Fille à la cage and La Petite Fille au tablier to
Boucher have been questioned. See Laing, “Madame
de Pompadour,” 44. Some of the “Boucher Children”
appeared on Gobelins furniture upholstery from around
the same time. See Standen, “Country Children,” 112–16.
Since Boucher was paid by Vincennes-Sèvres, the draw-
ings likely were made expressly for the porcelain manu-
factory. Françoise Joulie and Selma Schwartz, “Falconet
dans l’orbite de Boucher ou une amicale admiration,” in
Villechenon, Falconet, 47–59.
82. D’Albis, “La Marquise de Pompadour,” 61; and
Préaud, “La sculpture,” 37n41. Blondeau received payment
for these “huit modèles d’Enfants d’après M. Boucher” in
1753. Carton F2, Liasse 1, AMNS.
83. Préaud, “La sculpture,” 35.
84. Savill, “François Boucher,” 163; and Joulie, “Le rôle de
François Boucher,” 33.
85. Alastair Laing, “Boucher et la pastorale peinte,” Revue
de l’Art 73 (1986): 55–64.
86. Denis Diderot, “The Salon of 1765,” in Diderot on
Art I: The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, trans. John
Goodman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995),
159.
87. Guilhem Scherf, “Le ‘dernier fini’, débats sur
l’achèvement en sculpture,” in Guilhem Scherf, “Genre
Sculpture,” in Playing with Fire: European Terracotta
Models, 1740–1840, ed. James Draper, exh. cat. (New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 271–72.
See also Linda Walsh, “The ‘Hard Form’ of Sculpture:
Marble, Matter and Spirit in European Sculpture from
the Enlightenment through Romanticism,” Modern
Intellectual History 5, no. 3 (November 2008): 455–86.
88. See Rosalind Savill, The Wallace Collection Catalogue
of Sèvres Porcelain (London: Trustees of the Wallace
Collection, 1988), vol. 2, 820; and Versailles et les tables
royales en Europe: XVIIème–XIXème siècles, exh. cat. (Paris:
Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993),
285–86.
89. Préaud and Scherf, Manufacture, 98–99.
90. Coutts, Art of Ceramics, 238n20.
81 boucher’s spirit
91. Joulie, “Le rôle de François Boucher,” 39.
92. Cartons Y36–37, AMNS. Boucher’s designs were used
in ceramic sculpture prior to Bachelier’s arrival. Tamara
Préaud, “Jean-Jacques Bachelier à la manufacture de
Vincennes-Sèvres,” in Jean-Jacques Bachelier, 1724–1806:
Peintre du roi et de Madame de Pompadour, ed. Hélène
Mouradian, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy, éditions d’art,
1999), 64n26.
93. Svend Eriksen and Geoffrey de Bellaigue, Sèvres
Porcelain: Vincennes and Sèvres, 1740–1800 (Boston: Faber
and Faber, 1987), 89.
94. Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch, 13–21.
95. Ibid. See also Katie Scott, “Reproduction and
Reputation: ‘François Boucher’ and the Formation of
Artistic Identities,” in Rethinking Boucher, ed. Melissa
Hyde and Mark Ledbury (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2006), 95–99; and Melissa Hyde, “Getting
into the Picture: Boucher’s Self-Portraits of Others,” in
Rethinking Boucher, 15–17.
96. Carolina Mangone, “Bernini scultore pittoresco,” in
Material Bernini, ed. Evonne Levy and Carolina Mangone
(New York: Routledge, 2016), 69–104.
97. Watelet, Encyclopédie méthodique, 1:523.
98. Véronique Milande and Fabien Perronnet, “La sculp-
ture et ses techniques à Sèvres,” in Préaud and Scherf,
Manufacture, 33–41. Sometimes the clay models were
reassembled, fired, and conserved, or even remade when
originals were not salvageable. Préaud (Préaud, “L’atelier,”
21) argues that these terracottas were probably retained
as a last resort for reference. Martin (“Models and
Multiples,” 944) has interpreted the general lack of sur-
viving models for porcelain figures as a symptom of their
ambiguous artistic status.
99. Milande and Perronnet, “La sculpture,” 35.
100. Ibid., 36. Certain details, such as flowers or other
projecting attributes, were too delicate to be cast and were
thus modeled by hand.
101. Perrin-Khelissa, “Comment orne-t-on,” 226.
102. D’Albis, Traité, 115.
103. [Jean-Bernard Le Blanc], Observations sur les ouvrages
de MM. de l’Académie de peinture et de sculpture, exposés au
Sallon du Louvre en l’Année 1753, et sur quelques écrits qui
ont rapport à la Peinture (1753), 52. Le Blanc was a staunch
defender of Boucher’s paintings.
104. Thirty years later, Pierre-François Basan recycled
much of Le Blanc’s language in his entry for Boucher in
the Dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes, depuis
l’origine de la gravure (Paris, 1789), vol. 1, 90. “Son génie
fécond lui a fait une grande réputation dans tous les
genres . . . On a de lui 1, Quelques jolies eaux-fortes de
sa composition, consistant en jeux d’enfans.” See Scott,
“Reproduction,” 91–132.
105. Scott, “Reproduction,” 107–9.
106. Jacques Restout, “Vie de Boucher,” in Galerie
françoise, ou portraits des hommes et des femmes célèbres
qui ont paru en France (Paris, 1771), 5:4. Quoted in Scott,
“Reproduction,” 109.
107. Diderot, “Salon de 1763,” 74.
108. Sheriff, Moved by Love, 175–81.
109. Ibid., 178.
110. Le Blanc, Observations, 52–53.
111. M. le comte de Milly, L’art de la porcelaine (Paris,
1771), xxiii. See also Edmé-François Gersaint, Catalogue
raisonné des différens effets curieux & rares contenus dans
le cabinet de feu M. le Chevalier de la Roque (Paris, 1745),
85–87.
112. For the intellectual underpinnings of connoisseur-
ship, see Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the
Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2014).
113. Esprit “also signifies the character of an Author. He
wanted to imitate this Author, but he did not capture l’es-
prit.” Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, 4th ed. (Paris,
1762), 1:667. 
114. Roger de Piles, Élémens de peinture pratique, Nouvelle
Édition, ed. Charles-Antoine Jombert (Amsterdam, 1766),
436.
115. Watelet, Dictionnaire, 2:200.
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid., 200–1.
118. M. Desboulmiers, “Éloge de M. Boucher, premier
peintre du Roi & directeur de l’académie royale de pein-
ture & sculpture, mort le 30 Mai 1770,” Mercure de France
(September 1770), 188.
119. The Encyclopédie defined sculpture as “an art which,
by means of design [dessein] and solid matter, imitates
with the chisel the palpable objects of nature.” Diderot
and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 14:834.
120. For terracotta models, see Guilhem Scherf,
“‘Terracotta is the concern of genius’: Connoisseurs and
Collectors of Terracottas,” in Playing with Fire: European
Terracotta Models, 1740–1840, ed. James Draper, exh. cat.
(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), 2–7.
There is evidence of overlap between owners of ter-
racotta models and owners of biscuit porcelain. See
Tamara Préaud, “Les révolutions de la mode: Madame
de Pompadour et la sculpture en céramique,” in Madame
de Pompadour et les arts, 481; and Perrin-Khelissa,
“Comment orne-t-on,” 226. Among the early purchasers
of biscuit were Mme La Live de Jully and her husband
Ange-Laurent La Live de Jully, a collector of terracot-
tas. Livre-Journal, vol. 2, nos. 1397, 1450. According to
Tamara Préaud (“L’atelier,” 23) there were never any true
“collectors” of biscuit figurines in the eighteenth century.
Préaud (“Sculptures en porcelaine,” 94) has observed the
matte quality shared by biscuit and terracotta, although
she does not pursue this idea and does not link biscuit
to conceptions of sculptural process. See also Préaud,
“Eighteenth-Century Sèvres,” 44–51. Ironically, the comte
de Caylus recommended collecting terracotta models as a
way to improve taste and combat the pernicious influence
of porcelain magots, or “Chinese bric-à-brac.” Quoted in
Guilhem Scherf, “Collections et collectionneurs de sculp-
tures modernes. Un nouveau champ d’étude,” in L’art et
les normes sociales au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Thomas W.
Gaehtgens, Christian Michel, Daniel Rabreau (Paris:
Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2001),
152.
121. Pierre-Jean Mariette, Description sommaire des statues,
figures, bustes, vases, et autres morceaux de sculpture, tant
en marbre qu’en bronze & des modèles en terre cuite, porce-
laines, & fayences d’Urbin, provenans du cabinet de feu M.
Crozat (Paris, 1750), iii–iv.
122. Guilhem Scherf, “Le ‘dernier fini’, débats sur
l’achèvement en sculpture,” in La peinture de genre au
temps du cardinal Fesch: actes du colloque, Ajaccio, 15 juin
2007, ed. Philippe Costamagna and Olivier Bonfait (Paris:
Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2008), 167–77. This also applied to
painting. See Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory
of Painting (London, 1725), 167.
123. Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Mémoires inédits de Charles-
Nicolas Cochin sur le Comte de Caylus, Bouchardon, les
Slodtz, publiés d’après le manuscrit autographe, ed. Charles
Henry (Paris, 1880), 87. Quoted in Scherf, “Le ‘dernier
fini,’” 169.
124. Charles Paul Landon, Annales du Musée et de l’École
moderne des beaux-arts, vol. 23 (Paris, 1808), 1:81.
125. Malcolm Baker, “Narratives of Making: The
Interpretation of Sculptors’ Drawings and Models,” in
Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of Eighteenth-
Century Sculpture (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum,
2000), 34–49.
126. Ibid., 45.
127. Ibid., 48.
128. Unlike terracotta models, biscuit figurines were
reproductions. As Smentek (Mariette, 68–69) has shown,
however, even as eighteenth-century connoisseurs became
increasingly interested in the actual mark of an artist, they
still found value in reproductive prints.
129. Le Blanc, Observations, 84n.
130. See Panofsky, Idea, 115–21.
131. For Winckelmann’s preoccupation with deferral in
Michelangelo’s sculpting process, see Michael Fried,
“Antiquity Now: Reading Winckelmann on Imitation,”
October 37 (Summer 1986): 87–97. I thank Andrei Pop for
bringing this to my attention.
132. Similarly, drawing’s “openness to form” can be con-
trasted with the “closed and finished form” of a print.
Katie Scott, “Edme Bouchardon’s ‘Cris de Paris’: Crying
Food in Early Modern Paris,” Word & Image 29, no. 1
(2013): 65.
133. Federico Zuccari, L’idea de’ pittori, scultori et architetti
(Turin, 1607), 1:4.
134. See for example Scherf, “Le biscuit,” 68–69; and Jean-
Gérald Castex, “L’utilisation de l’estampe et de la pein-
ture par les artistes et les ateliers,” in Préaud and Scherf,
Manufacture, 65.
135. His first interaction with Vincennes-Sèvres was in
1755, when he designed a biscuit figurine for Madame de
Pompadour. Marie-Noëlle Pinot de Villechenon, “Un
sculpteur au royaume de la porcelaine,” in Villechenon,
Falconet, 22.
136. Ibid., 17. Falconet made sketches in Paris; an assistant
made clay models after the sketches, and Falconet brought
82 The Art Bulletin September 2022
the models to Vincennes-Sèvres. Préaud, “L’atelier,” 20.
Some clay models might have been made at Vincennes-
Sèvres, possibly by Falconet himself. Milande and
Perronnet, “La sculpture,” 33–34.
137. George Levitine, The Sculpture of Falconet
(Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1972), 30;
and Anne Betty Weinshenker, Falconet: His Writings and
His Friend Diderot (Geneva: Droz, 1966).
138. Préaud and Scherf, Manufacture, 100.
139. Ibid.
140. They perhaps were covered by his 1756 payment.
Joulie and Schwartz, “Falconet,” 52n12.
141. Alexandre Ananoff and Daniel Wildenstein, François
Boucher (Lausanne: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1976), vol. 1,
76–77, 80; 2:306–7.
142. Faÿ-Hallé, “Influence,” 348.
143. See Scherf, “Le biscuit,” 69.
144. Weinshenker, Falconet, 58–82; Joulie and Schwartz,
“Falconet,” 48 and Levitine, Sculpture, 9–21.
145. Étienne-Maurice Falconet, “Quelques idées qu’une
gazette allemande a occasionnées,” in Œuvres d’Étienne
Falconet, statuaire (Lausanne, 1781), 158.
146. Préaud and Scherf, Manufacture, no. 76. A second
series of Enfants Falconet, not based on Boucher’s designs,
appeared between 1764 and 1766.
147. L’Avantcoureur 40 (October 5, 1761), 636. See Joulie
and Schwartz, “Falconet,” 52.
148. L’Avantcoureur 7 (February 14, 1763), 102.
149. Pierre-Jean Mariette attributed printmaking’s gift
of immortality to “the number of prints pulled from the
same plate, and the manner in which they are kept.”
Pierre-Jean Mariette, Recueil d’estampes d’après les plus
beaux tableaux et d’après les plus beaux desseins qui sont en
France: dans le Cabinet du Roy, dans celuy de Monseigneur
le Duc d’Orléans, & dans d’autres cabinets (Paris, 1729),
vol. 1, i (emphasis added). A later text cribbed much of
Mariette’s language but added a more explicit remark
about the medium’s materiality: “Although a print is,
in effect, a rather soft and feeble substance, it becomes,
through its ease of multiplication and care one takes
to conserve it, victorious over bronze and even iron.”
Mercure de France (November 1772), 172. See also Scott,
“Reproduction,” 91.
150. Castex, “L’utilisation,” 61–62; and Joulie and
Schwartz, “Falconet,” 50–53.
151. Perrin-Khelissa, “Comment orne-t-on,” 224.
152. See Sarah Cree, “Translating Stone into Paper:
Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Prints after Antique
Sculpture,” in Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print
in Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth
Rodini, exh. cat. (Chicago: David and Alfred Smart
Museum of Art, 2005), 75–88.
153. Malcolm Baker, “The Ivory Multiplied: Small-Scale
Sculpture and Its Reproductions in the Eighteenth
Century,” in Sculpture and Its Reproductions, ed. Anthony
Hughes and Erich Ranfft (London: Reaktion Books,
1997), 61–78.
154. Ibid., 73.
155. Most of the prints follow a similar compositional
format; one exception is the print after Le Marchand de
gimblettes, in which the landscape recedes perspectivally in
the background toward a rustic church.
156. See Marianne Roland Michel, “Watteau’s Work in
Prints,” in Watteau: An Artist of the Eighteenth Century
(Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1984), 239–77. Meissen
acquired examples of the Joullain Livres de figures.
Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, “Graphic Sources for Meissen
Porcelain: Origins of the Print Collection in the Meissen
Archives,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 31 (1996): 110–11.
157. Perrin Stein, “Repackaging China for France: The
Collaboration of François Boucher and Gabriel Huquier,”
The French Porcelain Society Journal 4 (2011): 49–67.
158. See Victor I. Carlson and John W. Ittmann, eds.,
Regency to Empire: French Printmaking 1715–1814, exh cat.
(Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1984),
360.
159. Joulie and Schwartz, “Falconet,” 53.
160. Ibid.
161. See Emmanuelle Delapierre, Quand la gravure fait
illusion: Autour de Watteau et Boucher, le dessin gravé au
XVIIIe siècle (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2008).
162. See, for example, Denis Diderot, “Salon de 1767,”
in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, vol. 11: Beaux-Arts, ed. J.
Assézat (Paris, 1876), 2:376.
163. Scott, “Reproduction,” 114–18.
esthétiques d’un sculpteur-philosophe,” Dix-Huitième
Siècle 38 (2006): 629–41.
169. Lichtenstein, “Disegno,” 226.
170. Ibid.
171. See Anne Betty Weinshenker, A God or a
Bench: Sculpture as a Problematic Art during the Ancien
Régime (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008).
172. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative,
Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2001).
173. Ibid., 24–25.
174. Étienne-Maurice Falconet, “Réflexions sur la sculp-
ture,” in Œuvres d’Étienne Falconet, 1:21.
175. Ibid., 1:22.
176. Ibid., 1:11.
177. Ibid., 1:23–31.
178. For the use of pictorial language in Michelangelo’s
poetry on the sculptural process, see Michael W. Cole,
Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Art of the Figure (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 66–68.
179. Ibid., 87.
180. Scott, “Reproduction,” 107.
181. Cole, Art of the Figure, 69–72.
182. See Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

164. See Charlotte Guichard, “Signatures, Authorship and 183. Michael Cole, “The Figura Sforzata: Modelling,
Autographie in Eighteenth-Century French Painting,” Art Power and the Mannerist Body,” Art History 24, no. 4
History 41, no. 2 (April 2018): 266–91. (September 2001): 529. As Zsófia Szür (“Réflexions,” 28)
has argued, Diderot describes Falconet’s Pygmalion in the
165. Pierrette Jean-Richard, L’oeuvre gravé de François
language of modeling a pliable substance.
Boucher dans la Collection Edmond de Rothschild (Paris:
Éditions des musées nationaux, 1978), n. 337. The print,
dated to ca. 1763, was produced after a pen drawing and
thus could not have yielded the counterproof. Joulie and This article has been republished with minor changes.
Schwartz, “Falconet,” 54. A chalk-manner print, L’Enfant These changes do not impact the academic content
à la bouteille, made by Gilles Demarteau after Le Petit of the article.
Sganarelle, is signed “f. Boucher f. 1769,” indicating
that it reproduced a later drawing by Boucher after his
original drawing for the figurine. Jean-Richard, L’oeuvre
gravé, n. 778.
166. Watelet, Dictionnaire, 5:785.
167. Weinshenker, Falconet, 2.
168. Étienne-Maurice Falconet, Œuvres d’Étienne Falconet,
statuaire; Contenant plusieurs écrits relatifs aux beaux arts,
6 vols. (Lausanne, 1781). See also Michèle Beaulieu, “Les
‘écrits’ de Falconet sur la sculpture (1716–1791),” Bulletin
de la société de l’histoire de l’art français 1991 (1992):
173–85; Zsófia Szür, “Réflexions sur l’art de la sculpture
au XVIIIe siècle: Diderot et Falconet,” in Quand l’artiste
se fait critique d’art: Échanges, passerelles et résurgences,
ed. Simon Daniellou and Ophélie Naessens (Rennes:
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 19–30; Philippe
Junod, “Falconet: La plume et le ciseau ou de la philol-
ogie à l’esthétique,” in Penser l’art dans la seconde moitié
du XVIIIe siècle: théorie, critique, philosophie, histoire, ed.
Christian Michel and Carl Magnusson (Paris: Somogy
éditions d’art, 2013), 159–72); and Martial Guédron, “Le
‘beau réel’ selon Étienne-Maurice Falconet. Les idées

83 boucher’s spirit