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In 1745, a marquise not yet thirty took over as Louis XV's closest companion at Versailles, and within a few years she had made a Parisian painter named François Boucher the taste of an entire court. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, known to history as Madame de Pompadour, sat for Boucher again and again, and in 1751 she appointed him her personal drawing teacher. He returned the favor by giving Versailles exactly the mood it wanted: plump cupids, pink-cheeked shepherdesses, mythological scenes with none of the moral weight the old history painters demanded.

Boucher had trained under an engraver close to Watteau and spent time in Rome before settling into a Paris workshop that turned out an astonishing volume of work, tapestry designs for the Gobelins and Beauvais manufactories, opera sets, porcelain patterns, alongside the paintings. In 1765 the king made him Premier Peintre, the top court post, and director of the Royal Academy.

By the time he died in 1770, tastes were already turning. A new generation, led by his own former pupil Jean-Baptiste Greuze and later by Jacques-Louis David, dismissed his frivolity as exactly the decadence the coming Revolution would condemn. His paintings of Madame de Pompadour, though, still hang in the Wallace Collection in London and the National Gallery of Scotland, dated exactly to the years she shaped the artistic life of France.