One of François Boucher’s many portraits of Madame de Pompadour is of her at her dressing. As seen in Figure I – and this will be the portrait in discussion for the rest of the paper – this half-length rococo portrait depicts the marquise sitting in a yellowish-brown chair before a dressing table performing her daily toilette. At first glance, we are immediately drawn to the pink ruffles and the lace of her costume, the decorative cameo on her wrist, the flowers and the gold powder box crowned by a white puff on the table to the rogue box of gold and the powdered brush, up towards the pink on her cheeks and the blue bow on her hair. To the right of the composition lies the back edge of what looks to be a small mirror used to aid Pompadour in …show more content…
The portrait of Madame de Pompadour at her toilette is composed in such a way that there is no clear distinction between the pictorial space and the viewer’s space and between proximity and distance as there is no fourth wall on the painting. The portrait is presented in a particular manner such that there is no escape when we view the work. And when looking at the portrait, the size of the figure in relation to everything else gives an overall effect of proximity that can suggest the idea of the portrait being almost like a self-portrait drawn from the reflection of the mirror instead of a portrait of Pompadour drawn by Boucher . According to Hyde, the placement of the cosmetic brush being placed in Pompadour’s left hand indicates the reversed mirrored image of the marquise. She argued this because of the normality in 18th century paintings to depict almost everyone as right-handed, except in the case of self-portraits, where artists are portraying themselves as they see in their own reflection . As a result, such notion can further evoke the idea of the self-representation of the marquise. In addition, the circumstance that Boucher painted the marquise as being ‘left-handed’ unwrapped the view of how easily it is for artists to manipulate representations on a canvas in order to convey a particular meaning – in this case, status, power and