Exhibition Review: The Art of Louis-Leopold Boilly. Modern Life in Napoleonic France

The 150th anniversary of the death of Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845) was marked by renewed attention to his innovations in genre painting and portraiture, his exhibition and media strategies, and his trompe l’oeil virtuosity. Susan L. Siegfried (Research Projects Manager of the Getty Art History Information Program), acting as guest curator, assembled forty-four of his works in the first comprehensive exhibition outside France to be devoted to this artist. The exhibition opened at the Kimbell Art Museum (November 5, 1995-January 14, 1996) with a two-day symposium, and then traveled to its only other venue, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (February 4-April 28, 1996).

Fascinating works abounded, from the celebrated The Triumph of Marat (1794; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille) to the first public showing of Thirty-Five Expressive Heads (c. 1823–28; William I. Koch collection), Boilly’s experiment with caricature and optics. Visitors could also see a superb table-top still life (c. 1803–14; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille), where a double self-portrait appears to be tossed “down” next to coins, quill pens, playing cards, and “broken glass.” Direct viewing greatly facilitates our appreciation of how successfully Boilly’s grisaille or sepia oil paintings simulate graphic media. Happily, the artist is well served by the excellent illustrations in Siegfried’s book. The latter is neither a catalog of the exhibition, nor a biographical assessment of Boilly’s career, but rather a study of his art as a construction of social meaning in the public sphere during the critical period between the French Revolution and the end of the Bourbon Restoration.

Siegfried’s aim is to “raise questions about the culture and society of his time relating to issues of gender, class, and the politics of art” (ix). Her methodology incorporates influences from the school of cultural studies led by Lynn Hunt, literary theory, and feminism. Her analysis proceeds simultaneously on many levels, explicating topical events and mores, patronage and the art market, the dissemination of the composition or subsidiary figures through ancillary works, and contemporary psychic tensions. For example, Boilly’s Directory satires of social types, such as The Incredible Parade (c. 1797; private collection, Paris), are read against an array of visual and textual sources which range from contemporary fashions as codes to class and political stance through quotations from Sébastien Mercier’s Le Nouveau Paris (1798) and government-sponsored journalism. Siegfried argues that these satires disclose “the bankruptcy of political language” (78) and “the disruptive effects of money and leisure” (81) and express middle-class anxieties about social inversion and political corruption. Discursive footnotes offer suggestions for further reading; a formal bibliography would have been welcome.

The structure of the book is generally chronological, although similar works from different periods are considered together. Chapters are devoted to Boilly’s Rococo boudoir scenes after his arrival in Paris in 1785, his response to Revolutionary events, social mores during the Directory, gendered portrait roles and the identity of the artist, the construction of leisure, and, finally, eroticized spectatorship and trompe l’oeil illusionism. Three fundamental, interconnected issues are genre painting as “spectacle,” the artist as entrepreneur, and self-referential mimesis as a “dialogue between representation and viewing” (xi).

Siegfried sees Boilly’s “user-friendly” form of genre painting as “less a moral configuration than a spectacle, with no strongly articulated narrative or hierarchical order” (x). By this she means more than a merely additive extension of the viewing experience through multiple compositional foci. Thematic and expressive meaning is ruptured when alternate or contradictory cues link figures to each other or to the spectator. This non-linear approach to narrative was evident in Boilly’s works from the beginning of his career. Rococo erotic intrigues were...