Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845) is less celebrated than he deserves to be. A jack of all trades with plenty of tricks up his sleeve, a master of trompe-l’oeil and enthusiast for optical illusions, Boilly was an innovator who explored and developed a variety of styles and subjects in the Paris to which he came in his youth and which he portrayed for the rest of his life with unflagging enthusiasm. A new and entertaining exhibition at the Musée Cognacq-Jay, “Boilly: Chroniques parisiens,” examines Boilly’s many facets with an emphasis on Boilly the Parisian.1 As Annick Lemoine explains at the beginning of the catalogue, rather than depict Paris’s great historical events, famous figures, and monuments, Boilly, a genre painter par excellence, preferred to concentrate on everyday life in Paris in all its curious and often comical aspects.
The Musée Cognacq-Jay, an exquisite little museum and, like Boilly, less well-known than it ought to be, is an ideal setting for an exhibition about the painter, not least because several of his pictures are in its permanent holdings. Opened in 1929, the museum preserves the collection that Ernest Cognacq (1839–1928), the founder of Paris’s Samaritaine department store, and his wife and business partner Marie-Louise Jaÿ (1838–1925) left to the city of Paris. For many years, the museum was next to Samaritaine de Luxe on the Boulevard des Capucines. It was transferred in 1990 to L’hôtel Donon, which survives from the end of the sixteenth century and was restored in the 1980s. Cognacq’s great love was the art of the eighteenth century, and the museum is rich in paintings by Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, Romney, Reynolds, and the three great Venetians Tiepolo, Canaletto, and Guardi as well as sculptures, porcelains, and other objects from the period (and a few paintings from other periods including Rembrandt’s Balaam and the Ass, from 1626).
Exhibitions devoted to one artist tend to be chronological. This one, however, ends with Boilly’s early works from the years after he arrived in Paris in 1785 from Arras (where he briefly lived and worked after leaving his birthplace in La Bassée near Lille). It makes sense to have these early pictures, described as “little theatres of intimate life,” on the same floor and next to Boucher in the permanent collection since Boilly, influenced by him and Dutch genre painters like Gabriel Metsu, Gerard ter Borch, Caspar Netscher, and Gerrit Dou, in his early phase worked in the eighteenth-century libertine style. All of the pictures here date from the time of the French Revolution and suggest that even amid extreme turmoil turning into bloodbath, there were yet traces of douceur de vivre at least for those who managed to avoid the guillotine. L’Indiscret (1795), in which a saucy-faced maid, her bodice pulled down, holds a pitcher for her excited mistress while a gallant opens the door, is from the museum’s permanent collection, as is Le Doux réveil (The Sweet Awakening, ca. 1795). Ça ira, ou La Lutte galante (That’ll Do, or The Gallant Struggle) from 1790 is a comical look at lustful joy: the painting depicts an amorous couple, but its ironic title echoes a revolutionary battle cry. Deux jeunes amies qui s’embrassent (Two Young Lovers Embrace, ca. 1789–93) offers a touch of libertine Sapphism. In the catalogue, Sixtine de Saint-Léger tells us that while these “gallant scenes” provided Boilly with a living in those dark times, they nearly led him to trouble. In 1794, an artist now forgotten, Jean-Baptiste Wicar, denounced Boilly’s work to the Société républicaine des arts as containing “obscenity revolting to republican morality.” Presumably fond of his head, Boilly turned to other genres.
Boilly’s varied depictions of his own visage in the exhibition’s opening room might prompt an observer to ask for the real Boilly to please stand up. In one painting from around 1793, he presents himself in a rather loutish way, his mouth turned down with a pipe and a cockade on his head in a self-portrait as a sans-culotte, a member of the revolution’s street arm. By contrast, about the same time, he powdered his hair and put a stock around his neck for a self-portrait as a counter-revolutionary muscadin. Later during the Napoleonic period, he shows himself with a startled expression as “Jean-who-laughs” and also his father as “Jean-who-weeps” (both ca. 1808–10), after Voltaire’s poem about the versatility of human emotions. In middle age, he sketched five studies of himself (1823–27), and when he was aged sixty-nine in 1830, he painted a mixture of self-portrait and genre study in Aprés le souper (After Supper). Boilly did not allow old age to cramp his style—this last picture especially is subtle and original. So too is Scène du carnaval (Carnival Scene, 1832), the largest of his so-called boulevard spectacles. This carnival tableau, complete with Pierrots and Harlequins and set on the Boulevard Saint-Martin against by a cloudy winter sky, is the culmination of a long series of crowd scenes in which all classes from dandyish aristocrats to paupers (and sometimes Boilly and members of his family) served as extras. The first such picture, Le Marche incroyable (The Marvelous Procession, ca. 1797), shows a small crowd with members ranging from sans-culotte ruffians to fashionably dressed couples and with a convertible coach that seems to be flying through the sky. It is the new world, after the deluge of the Terror, and a few uniformed figures hint at the future Napoleonic Wars. Like Jane Austen across the channel, Boilly barely gave a passing glance to the dramatic events of the day. Instead, he opted for local, everyday dramas such as the several different scenes in L’Arrivée d’une diligence dans la cour des Messageries (The Arrival of the Stagecoach in the Courtyard of the Post, 1803) or the depiction from 1819 of unwashed fanatics fighting their way into a free performance at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu-Comique. Even during the dark years of the French Revolution, theaters were springing up in Paris, and they continued to do so in the years after. Boilly never portrayed a stage performance, however. The theater of the streets was what interested him, as it did his contemporary Balzac and, later, Charles Baudelaire, who evoked one of Boilly’s pictures in a prose poem.
The exhibition also gathers instances of Boilly’s trompe l’oeil technique in such gems as Le Chat gourmand crevant une toile pour manger des harengs (The Greedy Cat Ripping a Canvas to Eat Herrings, ca. 1800–05) and documents his use of optical instruments and techniques to create illusions. He painted pocket-sized photographs that captured their subjects with impressive acuity. His satirical skill shines and amuses in Grimaces (ca. 1823) and other caricatures of doctors (ca. 1823), art collectors (ca. 1823), and men with round noses (ca. 1827) or moustaches (1824).
The compact, satisfying exhibition displays the art of a delightful and original artist in a suitably intimate setting—the Musée Cognacq-Jay is one of Paris’s most agreeable museums. Parisians and visitors alike will find it worth a trip.