His career was hugely successful and he received many honors, becoming Director of the the Royal Gobelins Manufactory in 1755 and finally Premier Peintre du Roi (First Painter of the King) in 1765. Madame de Pompadour (mistress of King Louis XV), whose name became synonymous with Rococo art, was a great fan of Boucher's, and it is particularly in his portraits of her that this style is clearly exemplified. Boucher mastered every branch of decorative and illustrative painting, from colossal schemes of decoration for the royal chateaux of Versailles, Fontainebleau, Marly, and Bellevue, to designs for fans and slippers. 

Reflecting inspiration gained from the artists Watteau and Rubens, Boucher's early work celebrates the idyllic and tranquil, portraying nature and landscape with great élan. However, his art typically forgoes traditional rural innocence to portray scenes with a definitive style of eroticism. In his typical paintings Boucher turned traditional mythological themes into wittily indecorous scenes galantes, and he painted female flesh with a delightfully healthy sensuality, notably in the celebrated Reclining Girl (Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 1751), which probably represents Louis XV's mistress Louisa O'Murphy. 

Towards the end of his career, as French taste changed in the direction of Neoclassicism, Boucher was attacked, notably by Diderot, for his stereotyped coloring and artificiality; he relied on his own repertory of motifs instead of painting from the life and objected to nature on the grounds that it was 'too green and badly lit'. Certainly his work often shows the effects of superficiality and overproduction, but at its best it has irresistible charm and great brilliance of execution, qualities he passed on to his most important pupil, the neoclassicist artist Jacques-Louis David. 

François Boucher died in Paris on May 30, 1770. His name, along with that of his patron Madame de Pompadour, had become synonymous with the French Rococo style, leading the Goncourt brothers to write: "Boucher is one of those men who represent the taste of a century, who express, personify and embody it."