If you’ve never heard of French artist Louis-Léopold Boilly, you’re not alone.
In the 2019 preamble for the “Boilly: Scenes of Parisian Life” exhibition at The National Gallery in London, experts noted that the artist was barely known in the UK, mainly because most of his works haven’t been studied together.
Boilly (1761–1845) painted Parisians during one of the most turbulent times in France’s history in the decades before and after the 19th century: the French Revolution (1789–1799), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) that led to The Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830) and the reign of King Louis XVIII, to name a few pivotal events.
He specialized in portraiture, painting some 5,000 small portraits (although some experts say it was fewer). With skill and dashing wit, he also created delightful “trompe l’oeil” (“trick of the eye”) paintings and sometimes scathing caricatures, many of which were self-portraits.
Portraits and Illusions
Boilly, the son of a woodcarver, grew up in La Bassée, near Arras in northern France, close to the Belgium border, where trompe l’oeil painting was as popular as in neighboring Flanders. Boilly learned the genre from local painter Guillaume-Dominique-Jacques Doncre. It’s unknown where Boilly learned portrait painting, but he began his profession in 1779, when he was around 18 years old.
In 1800, Boilly painted an illusionistic painting titled “Trompe L’oeil” (“Trick of the Eye”), coining the phrase that became the name of the genre of this illusionistic art that had been practiced since ancient Greece.
When exhibited at the Louvre, his trompe l’oeil painting “A Collection of Drawings” left viewers in such rapture as they pored over the piece in disbelief that a balustrade had to be erected to contain the crowd.
A trompe l’oeil piece that Boilly painted in the early 1800s shows his skills in portraiture and painting true to nature. He rendered a coin, a glass lens, and various small drawings and painted studies, including a small portrait of a young man. Without seeing the painting in person, it’s hard to tell if the wooden frame is real, but the creased, colored papers hint that the piece is an illusion. (An artist placed clues to a trompe l'oeil painting’s deception, such as a tear, a crease, an up-turned corner in the paper, or a broken sheet of glass over the artwork).
Northern Renaissance masters inspired Boilly, particularly the Dutch, and he collected Dutch paintings throughout his life. He was often compared to Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Dou, who focused on small, detailed genre and trompe l’oeil paintings. The Dutch used window motifs in many of their paintings; one only has to think of the eminent Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer’s ladies who read their letters in the light of the window.
Painting History in the Making
Boilly captured the hustle and bustle of Napoleonic Paris well in his painting “Entrance to the Jardin Turc (Turkish Garden Cafe),” which can be seen at the Getty Center along with its preparatory drawing.
Boilly lived in the area of the cafe and must’ve seen similar scenes of Parisians taking shelter on a shady boulevard. He chose to paint an organ grinder entertaining a crowd with a puppet show. On the sidelines, a child shows a middle-class couple his tame marmot. Some of the people in the scene come from Boilly’s portraits. Beside the tree trunk, the woman in white appears to daydream, echoing one of his sitters. Boilly put himself in the painting. He’s wearing a top hat and spectacles, quietly observing us as he did so well in life.
One of Boilly’s most memorable history paintings, considered the highest genre of art at the time, commemorates Napoleon’s coronation. On Dec. 2, 1804, Napoleon crowned himself “Emperor of the French” in an opulent coronation ceremony held at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, rather than at the traditional venue for French coronations: Reims Cathedral in the northeastern city of Reims.
Napoleon commissioned his painter, Jacques-Louis David, to commemorate the historic and unprecedented event. David didn’t disappoint. His imposing painting, nearly 20 feet tall by 33 feet wide, “The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of the Empress Joséphine in Notre-Dame Cathedral on 2 December 1804” (often shortened to “The Coronation of Napoleon”), reflects the spirit and grandeur of the three-hour ceremony. David took just over two years to complete the work, showing the moment that Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine, surrounded by French and foreign dignitaries, kneels to receive her empress crown from her husband. Seeing the monumental painting, Napoleon exclaimed, “One can walk through this painting!”
David first exhibited the painting in the 1808 annual French Royal Academy salon at the Louvre.
The imperial household commissioned Boilly to paint the public reception of David’s painting at the Louvre. In a now-lost letter, Boilly had written to David, asking permission to copy the painting for his new work. David visited Boilly’s studio to give him his reply in person, but on finding him absent, he left a charming note:
“David came to give his response to M. Boilly verbally; It will be favorable, as he has every reason to expect from someone who had always made a case for his talent, above all [from someone] wanting to treat a subject which could only flatter him infinitely. He notes that, for the moment, the picture is still rolled up since its return from the Salon; but as soon as M. Boilly needs it—that is to say a few days from now—he should feel free to come to my studio, place de Sorbonne, and there he will do anything necessary for his [Boilly’s] painting, of which the idea is charming and can only gain by being treated by him.
“I have already observed [the crowd looking at my painting], and we shall see if we both perceived it the same way.”
Napoleon’s coronation was an event like no other, and these paintings were the closest that many French people could be to the real event. Visitors to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York can see Boilly’s finished work, “The Public Viewing David’s ‘Coronation’ at the Louvre.”
In his painting, a crowd of excited people try to catch a glimpse and a feel for the occasion that David painted. Parents carry their children high on their shoulders to see the painting, while other people point out certain elements of the scene through the crowd.
An officer wearing a bicorne (two-cornered) hat, on the left side of the painting, reads aloud a guide to the piece and points out all the dignitaries that David painted, says The Met’s emerita curator Katharine Baetjer in an audio recording on the museum website. Boilly used three bicorne hats to guide us to the focal point in David’s painting: Joséphine. People remove their hats “either in deference to the imperial couple or for better visibility,” The Met website notes.
Six faces in the scene are portraits that Boilly had previously painted of artists, politicians, and men of letters. He also included a profile view of his son Julien, who would have been around 13 years old at the time. He’s just above the little girl in the blue dress. The bespectacled man in a top hat looking out of the painting is Boilly himself.
Through Boilly’s art, we can see Paris, Parisians, and the events that impacted and shaped not only late 18th- and early 19th-century France but also Europe and America.
Sotheby’s dealer James Macdonald wrote in an auction catalog that “Boilly painted a dazzling-cross section of French society, including artists, doctors, soldiers, nobles, matrons, and children, ensuring that these portraits in their totality almost seem to capture the era better than any other monument or artwork of the age.”
