Louis-Leopold Boilly (1761-1845)
French Artist
“Les epouoc  assortis”, Circa 1825
13 x 9-3/4 inches
hand-colored lithograph
great color
excellent condition

Louis Boilly was born in a part of Northern France with a strong Flemish influence. In 1785, he settled in Paris, where he made his reputation as a painter of small-scale portraits and genre scenes of contemporary city life. During the Reign of Terror he came under suspicion because of the alleged frivolity of his subjects; only the discovery at his home of drawings for a painting of The Triumph of Marat (c.1794; Versailles) saved him from prison, or worse.

He continued his very productive career (he claimed to have executed 5,000 portraits) recording fashionable Parisian life through the Revolution, the Directory, the Empire, and on into the Restoration period. Among his best-known works is the Gathering of Artists in Isabey’s Studio (1798; Paris, Louvre), which depicts meticulously the most successful artists of the day.

Boilly’s precisely detailed and smoothly finished style owes much to the Dutch and Flemish genre painters of the 17th century, whose works were widely collected during his lifetime. In the 1820s he was one of the first French artists to experiment with lithography as a way to reproduce his paintings.

Collections
Boilly is represented in the following collections: National Gallery, London; Courtauld Institute of Art, London; The Wallace Collection, London: Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, UK; The Louvre, Paris; Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris; Musée des Augustins, Toulouse; Fondation Bemberg Museum, Toulouse; Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels; Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, amongst others.