Madame De Pompadour: Painted Pink

Cassandra A. Albinson

Softcover | 17.81 x 0.86 x 21.74 cm | 96 pp

Yale University Press | 2022 | 9780300263817

A fresh take on a beloved masterpiece of portraiture, focusing on the complex significance of the colour pink in eighteenth-century France.

François Boucher’s 1750 half-length portrait of Madame de Pompadour―influential court figure and mistress to King Louis XV―has been the subject of much art historical attention, particularly with regard to gender and representation. Building on that foundation, this volume turns toward an under appreciated aspect of the portrait: the use and significance of the colour pink.

Four scholarly essays, including one by noted Boucher expert Mark Ledbury, establish a framework that connects Pompadour’s fondness and promotion of the colour, Boucher’s artistic association with the colour, and developments in the material basis of the colour, including its application in other media such as porcelain.

This engaging close look offers new ways to understand the portrait, revealing its links to motherhood and sentiment, race and the transatlantic slave trade, and the crosscurrents of natural history and scientific discovery.