Introduction |
Watteau and the Fête Galante |
Fashion and Gallantry |
Chardin
Greuze and His Followers |
Fragonard |
Boilly |
Image List |
Exhibition Information
Boilly
The same response is seen in Louis-Léopold Boilly's art, which takes us into the first decade of the nineteenth century. The small Cardsharp on the Boulevard was
painted almost with the finesse of a miniature, as he detailed with meticulous
care the various activities on a Paris boulevard, from a cardsharp with his
credulous victims to a young woman soliciting an older man. Some veiled moral
lessons may lurk here, but we feel that Boilly, like a modern urban stroller,
took a detached pleasure in observing these scenes of the perennial human comedy.
Boilly was working a century after Watteau, and his scene is undoubtedly more
true to life than Watteau's enigmatic fêtes galantes. Yet both artists were acute and sensitive observers of the world around them. Both also worked within an art form--genre painting--whose developments and transformations function, at one level, as a constantly changing mirror of Parisian life and culture.
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