Louis-Léopold Boilly
1761 (La Bassée) / 1845 (Paris)
A portraitist, a painter of stories rather than history, Louis-Léopold Boilly has haunted the consciousness of art educators since his death in 1845. A master of the small, the vile everyday things of life, his work nonetheless raises the genre to the heights.
A product of the Ancien Régime, Voltairian and Rousseauist at the same time, brought up to the taste of his first patron Calvet de Lapalun, the very archetype of the sumptuous provincial parliamentarian, he knows this time blessed by Chateaubriand and seems, by rebound, to find enough motives to sharpen his criticism of the present he is going through. But, to agree on a modernity this time all iconographic, he shows himself especially a precursor and invents the Meeting of Artists - the Workshop of Isabey and that of Houdon - that Fantin-Latour and others will meditate much later.
A portraitist, a painter of stories rather than history, Louis-Léopold Boilly has haunted the consciousness of art educators since his death in 1845. A master of the small, the vile everyday things of life, his work nonetheless raises the genre to the heights.
A product of the Ancien Régime, Voltairian and Rousseauist at the same time, brought up to the taste of his first patron Calvet de Lapalun, the very archetype of the sumptuous provincial parliamentarian, he knows this time blessed by Chateaubriand and seems, by rebound, to find enough motives to sharpen his criticism of the present he is going through. But, to agree on a modernity this time all iconographic, he shows himself especially a precursor and invents the Meeting of Artists - the Workshop of Isabey and that of Houdon - that Fantin-Latour and others will meditate much later.
Artist's exhibitions
Boilly – Rétrospective
04/11/2011 - 06/02/2012
(Lille) Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille
04/11/2011 - 06/02/2012
(Lille) Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille