Portrait of Mr. Jacques P*** - Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761 - 1845)

View: 8 ¼” x 6 1/8” (21 x 15.5 cm); stretcher 8 ½” x 6 ½” (21.5 x 16.5cm); framed 11 3/8” x 9” (29 x 23 cm)
The autograph nature of this portrait was confirmed by artist specialists Pascal Zuber and Etienne Bréton.

This vivid portrait is a perfect example of the small portraits that made Boilly's reputation. Executed in just two hours and sold at an attractive price, they provided the artist with most of his income, and we are still captivated today by the artist's finely-tuned psychological analysis of his many models.

1. Louis-Léopold Boilly

Louis-Léopold Boilly was born in 1761 in the village of La Bassée, southwest of Lille (now part of the Lille metropolitan area), where his father was a woodcarver. From 1775, he lived in Douai with a relative, a prior of the Augustine order. It is not known who gave Boilly his first training. A very early practice of portrait painting, partly self-taught, seems to have launched him into his profession. In 1779, he moved to Arras, where he began practicing his art, then in 1785 to Paris, where two years later he married Marie-Madeleine Desligne, the daughter of a merchant of Arras.

His family portraits, conceived as intimate domestic scenes, attracted the attention of a literary-minded provincial aristocrat of literary bent, Calvet de La Palun, who commissioned him to paint a series of narrative genre subjects based on texts furnished by him. From 1791 onwards, Boilly regularly exhibited portraits and genre scenes at the Paris Salons. When private patronage dwindled after the outbreak of the Revolution, he sought to reach a wider popular audience by painting boudoir scenes of midly licentious character, to be reproduced in quantity by the printmakers.

A lukewarm supporter of the Revolution, he was denounced in 1794 to the Société Républicaine des Arts by a fellow artist, the Jacobin zealot Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1762-1834), for having painted "obscene works revolting to republican morality". The denunciation was forwarded to Robespierre's Comité de salut public. At the height of the Terror, this was a life-threatening accusation of which Boilly managed to clear himself by painting Triumph of Marat (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille). His wife had meanwhile succumbed to the anxiety caused by these alarms. Remarried in 1795, Boilly benefited from the pacification resulting from the fall of Robespierre. The resurgence of luxury and elegance in the years that followed brought him new patrons and supplied him with subjects for the kind of social observation that suited his temperament: amused, uncensorious, vividly pictorial and often spiced with a mild bawdiness and a touch of caricature.

In his choice of subjects, he had an immediate French predecessor in Philibert-Louis Debucourt (1755-1832), who had himself been inspired by the Englishman Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827). In adapting these prototypes, Boilly gave them a plainer middle-class aspect and treated them with a profusion of mundane detail that contemporaries described as "Dutch", comparing them to the styles of Gérard Terborch II (1617-I68I), or Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667). The factuality of his social and physical observations was, however, tempered by his invariable classicist embellishment of his young female figures, the hard distinctness of his colors, and the glassy smoothness of his brushwork.

Boilly's work evolved very gradually from a classicizing Louis-XVI style to a French version of Biedermeier, always contemporary in subject matter and popular in tone, but tending towards mannerisms and repetitions that mitigated its underlying realism.

Boilly last exhibited at the Salon in 1824. Among the works of his old age was a series of lithographs of comical facial expressions, his famous Grimaces. He died in 1845, aged eighty-four.

2. Small portraits, the artist's most characteristic artworks

Portraiture, having launched him on his career, remained to the end Boilly's most dependable source of income. His facility in executing to small portraits rapidly (in around two hours) and cheaply enabled him to be productive on an almost industrial scale, rivaling the output of photographers of later generations. By 1828, well before the end of his career, he could claim to have painted more than five thousand portraits. These portraits, "executed with great skill and a rare readiness to capture likeness", earned the painter a "universal reputation", according to the editor of the catalog for the sale of his collection in 1829 . Produced in bust form and generally in small, homogeneous formats (maximum 22 x 16.5 cm), they were immensely successful.

In searching for ways of capturing likenesses with speed, Boilly also tinkered with optical devices that, in turn, helped him to develop the illusionist techniques by which he brought off spectacular trompe-l'œil still lifes.
It doesn't matter that many of Boilly's portraits are anonymous or represent unknown models, often from the bourgeoisie that was beginning to emancipate itself in the wake of the Revolution, since it is their main characteristics – a high quality of execution linked with psychological truth - that still make them attractive today. In contrast to his genre scenes, Boilly eschews staging and uses a uniformly dark background, attaching little importance to clothing: except for the military, his male models (who make up the vast majority of the painter's models) are generally depicted dressed in dark suits and white ties, the brilliance of which brings out the subtlety of their complexions. When we look at the few major collections in which his small portraits are well represented (such as the thirty portraits on display on the second floor of the Musée Marmottan in Paris - last photo in the gallery), we are struck by the psychological depth expressed in each of them.

The portrait we present is of a man probably in his fifties. He is dressed in a green frock coat, which stands out against the gray-brown background that highlights his light gray hair, tending towards white. There are no wrinkles on his face, highlighted by the brightness of the skilfully knotted white tie (reflecting his relative youth or the painter's complacency?). The radiance of his eyes, the realism of his under-eye pockets and the subtlety of the barely sketched smile give him an extraordinary presence. The psychological analysis that emerges from this portrait is that of a rather spiritual man, quite introverted but with an unfailing determination.

The model's identity was indicated on the back of the stretcher but unfortunately, we were unable to read his family name, as the ink has smudged heavily on the stretcher. All we know for sure is his first name - Jacques - and the date of his death: August 11, 1816. Our portrait is certainly earlier, although we cannot be more precise about the date, given the timelessness of his frock coat and hairstyle, which in some ways recalls the wigs of the Ancien Régime.

3. Framing

As is customary with Boilly's small portraits, our portrait is framed in a stuccoed and gilded Empire-style frame with palm motifs, which is most probably its original frame.

Main bibliographical reference :
Boilly (1761 - 1845) - Catalogue of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille exhibition, edited by Annie Scottez- de Wambrechies and Florence Raymond - Editions Nicolas Chaudun 2011