Portrait Of A Young Boy With A Basket Of Flowers, After Louis-leopold Boilly

Portrait of a little boy carrying a basket of flowers.
Oil on wood from the first half of the19th century after a portrait by Louis-Léopold Boilly. By a student or a painter close to Boilly and who made this pretty copy directly from the original painting he had before his eyes, perhaps by a former owner who had this copy made for the model family.
The original work appears in the catalog raisonné of Boilly's works by Étienne Breton and Pascal Zuber (see photo at the end).
Oil on wood in very good condition, slightly warped panel.
Beautiful period frame in wood and gilded stucco. Dimensions with the frame 33x28 cm

Louis-Léopold Boilly born July 5, 1761 in La Bassée and died January 4, 1845 in Paris is a French painter, miniaturist and engraver. He is known in particular for his scenes of Parisian life in the years following the Revolution and his numerous small-format portraits. Born about twenty kilometers from Lille in a modest environment, Louis-Léopold Boilly is the son of a wood sculptor. He was raised in Douai where he learned about painting from Charles-Alexandre-Joseph Caullet until the age of 17. He then studied trompe l'oeil painting in Arras with Dominique Doncre before settling in Paris in 1785. To make a living, he became a portrait painter. Between 1789 and 1791, he executed a series of orders for the Avignon collector Esprit Calvet. His first style recalls the sentimental or moralizing style of Greuze and Fragonard in the 18th century, a genre to which he gradually integrated the precision of the Dutch masters of the previous century, of whom he had an important collection. He exhibited for the first time at the Salon of 1791 and became known as much for his portraits and trompe l'oeil paintings as for his genre scenes with gallant or ribald themes. In 1794, he was denounced by the painter Jean-Baptiste Wicar, a Puritan revolutionary, and the Popular and Republican Society of Arts threatened to have him prosecuted for obscenity by the Committee of Public Safety. In his defense, he invited the agents of the Committee to come to his workshop and showed them a series of paintings on patriotic subjects, including a Triumph of Marat executed on the occasion of the Year II competition organized by the revolutionary government. His meticulously observed and executed paintings reflect all the diversity of urban life, its costumes and customs, between the revolutionary period and the Restoration. They were highly appreciated by the public at the Salon, who awarded him a gold medal in 1804. In 1823, Boilly produced a series of humorous lithographs entitled Les Grimaces. He was named knight of the Legion of Honor and became a member of the Institut de France in 1833. His work, which includes a total of around 4,500 portraits (of which only the tenth has come down to us) and 500 genre scenes, goes from fashion after the Restoration. It is appreciated again today, particularly for its documentary interest. Boilly is certainly the only painter opposing revolutionary regimes, from the Terror to the Empire. He paints the daily and peaceful life of small people and the greatest, when official painting praised battles or coronations. His only war is around a pool table and pits young women against perplexed men.