Boucher’s Spirit: Authorship, Invention, and the Force of Porcelain

Abstract Deemed “ridiculous dolls” by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, porcelain figurines have long resided on the outskirts of art history. The exceptional case of biscuit porcelain figurines, invented in France in the 1750s, has been folded into an anachronistic story of stylistic change. This essay disentangles the history of porcelain figurines from the history of Neoclassicism. Through a close reading of the abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc’s (1707–1781) art criticism and analysis of a 1761 set of reproductive prints, it shows that biscuit figurines designed by the quintessentially rococo painter François Boucher defied assumptions about porcelain’s irreducible materiality, complicating fundamental eighteenth-century ideas about authorship.