GENERAL DESCRIPTION
As a young woman shows off her portrait, an older man examines it—or possibly the woman herself—through the lens of his glasses. Louis Léopold Boilly was a prolific portraitist, and he also frequently included portraits within his genre scenes, as he does here. The appearance of the portrait generates a complex circulation of glances and gestures that do not form a clear narrative or help us decide how the figures are interrelated. The highly finished surface of the painting and attention to the minute details of clothing and accessories are typical of French painting at the end of the 18th century.
Excerpt from
Heather MacDonald, DMA label copy, 2009.
NOTES
Checked Piction
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
Boilly's long career began during the ancien regime, survived the turbulent years of the Revolution, and continued unabated during the Napoleonic period. Early on he chose to specialize in the area of genre painting, producing images of romantic love affairs that were much in demand during the 1780s. However, when Revolutionary culture condemned such frivolous imagery along with the decadent society of the ancien regime with which it was identified, Boilly abandoned these explicitly gallant themes, and turned for his subject matter to the everyday life of the new social classes that now dominated public life. Boilly's keen, often cruelly humorous depictions of modern life during the first half of the 19th century offer a rich visual account ofthe rapidly changing society in which he lived.
In this early work, Boilly has given us a single scene from a narrative that might be reconstructed in several different ways. At first, we may think that the couple at center has been joined by their family to admire a portrait of the lady of the house that has just been delivered by a servant boy. However, the more one studies the regard of each player, the more peculiar the scene becomes. The aged matron gazes not at the painting,
but at the fresh-faced young woman, while the child at her knees points excitedly at the portrait. Meanwhile, the gentleman at center raises his monocle to one eye, as he squints intently at the young woman's shoulder, as though testing the likeness, not of the portrait to its sitter, but of the sitter to the portrait. The suspicion that Boilly is making light fun of these typically middle-class characters is hard to dismiss, even though the precise object of the artist's habitually rapier wit remains unclear. Could it be that it is the woman herselfwho is being appraised, perhaps through comparison to the engagement portrait that preceded her arrival at the house of her prospective husband? Is the child gesturing at the picture to call attention to the remarkable resemblance between it and the young woman who has appeared before him as ifby magic? We can only speculate, as the small dog at the left corner dares us to understand with his unblinking stare.
This picture, while undated, can be argued to have been executed sometime around 1790 through comparison to another painting by Boilly called The Visit Received (1789, Musee Sandelin, Saint Orner) in which the same figure of the servant boy at the far right of this composition appears. The young woman's costume also suggests a date of about 1790, before the Napoleonic years, when the empire-waisted dress becomes a regular feature of Boilly's genre scenes.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 28-29.
BOILLY:
A charming little genre scene by Louis-Léopold Boilly, Woman Showing Her Portrait (see fig. 112, p. 159) was painted during the Revolutionary period, when artists were developing a more realistic mode. A little boy has brought in a portrait of a young woman for his family to admire. There is a man admiring her bust, or is he admiring her portrait? It’s hard to tell through his looking glass. The scene is somewhat playful but also gives the sense of a typical bourgeois household of the time. The Boilly painting goes very nicely with a genre scene of the same period in the DMA collection by a not well-known but very talented painter, Pierre Nicolas Legrand: A Good Deed Is Never Forgotten (see fig. 106, p. 150). (22)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Aileen Ribeiro, The Mirror of History: The Art of Dress in late Eighteenth-Century France," 141- 155, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Approved name format indicated in bold. Title- Woman Showing Her Portrait.
In Louis Léopold Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait (fig. 104), the central figure is a young woman in an outfit clearly inspired by the gaulle, with a muslin skirt over a pink silk dress, a starched white kerchief, and a wide blue sash at the waist. She is shown standing by her portrait, in which she seems to be depicted in a chemise dress. The narrative of Boilly’s painting is obscure. Traditionally, one might have assumed that the young woman was on view as much as the painting was, but the man in black with an English-influenced brown frac (frock coat) seems more a connoisseur of fabrics than of female beauty. Do we see an artist proudly presenting a self-portrait here? This is certainly possible, as an increasing number of women (Vigée Le Brun, for example) were artists in late eighteenth-century France. Formerly known as A Family Admiring a Portrait of a Lady in an Interior, the painting does not make clear who the family members depicted are and what relationship they have to one another. The elderly woman (possibly a widow), seated on the left in an old-fashioned gray dress and plain white linen cap and scarf, may be part of the family or an old honored governess. The boy at her knee (perhaps a grandchild or former pupil) is possibly the son or the younger brother of the putative artist, and he excitedly points out the portrait’s likeness to the elegant young woman.
CHILDREN FASHION...Yet the first practical costume was probably the skeleton suit (so-called because it followed the shape of the body) for boys, which appeared in England in the mid-eighteenth century. By the 1780s, the type had spread to much of Europe, including France. The skeleton suit consisted of a cotton or linen jacket and loose trousers buttoned at the waist and tied with a sash; it was worn with an open, frilled collar, as in Boilly’s painting.
These variant titles usefully highlight the central motif of the painting, a depicted portrait and its role as a dramatic device in this genre scene. The display of the portrait provides a pretext for the social gathering shown here, and the exchanges taking place among the different characters depicted are prompted by their viewing of it as a work of art. The major themes I shall explore in this essay are the interplay between portrait painting and genre painting in French art of this period, and the practice of looking at art as an important form of Enlightenment sociability.
In Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait, a woman displays a portrait of herself to an assembled company. She is twice represented as the object of their gaze and of ours: she appears as an actor in the scene and as her likeness in an oval painted portrait. The collective appreciation of the woman-as- art is enacted by a gentleman who peers at her up close with a pince-nez or a magnifying glass, squinting in an unattractive way that makes him look less like a lover than a connoisseur. For him the portrait is a pretext for connoisseurship of the real living beauty, the woman. Her décolletage, which is repeated in the portrait, suggests where his scrutiny might lead.
With its muted erotic undertones, this painting seems to conform straightforwardly enough to a conventional representation of woman as the object of the (male) gaze. Yet Boilly’s scene is unusual because it puts a woman in charge of her own image: she holds her portrait and points to it, staging its presentation to her intimate circle. The fact that she physically handles the portrait is significant, since women were rarely shown holding artworks of any size, beyond a palm-size miniature.
His unusual coupling of a woman and her likeness in Woman Showing Her Portrait may owe something to an iconographic tradition called the Four Ages of Man. This iconography was usually represented in the form of a cycle or series, in which one scene or canvas was devoted to each age of man.
Boilly, who was an accomplished portraitist, often accorded portraits a narrative role in his galant scenes: delivered, returned, admired, hidden, and crushed, they suffer virtually the travails of his characters.
Boilly’s paintings opened up the categories of portraiture and genre painting by mixing their themes and motifs, and crossing the boundaries and viewing protocols of each. The variant titles given Woman Showing Her Portrait (which was simply called Portrait at one point) reflects this mingling of genres and themes. [MERGED PARAGRAPH]
The Enlightenment has often been described as an intellectual and cultural movement that was fascinated with hierarchy, with creating categories and defining conventions as part of a larger effort to organize knowledge into schemes based on rational criteria. But those categories were also subverted almost as soon as they were constructed, in fine arts much as in other areas of intellectual endeavour and material production. The Enlightenment also thrived on the interplay between sociability and knowledge.
That interplay underpins the subject of Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait and is further activated by the painting itself and the puzzle it poses to an audience to figure out what its subject might be.
TITLE
Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Woman Showing her Portrait (facing page and fig. 112, p. 159) presented something of a mystery when it appeared on the art market in the 1980s and 1990s: the subject of the painting was not entirely clear, nor was its place in Boilly’s oeuvre. When it was acquired by Michael L. Rosenberg in Dallas, Texas, the painting carried the title A Family Admiring a Portrait of a Lady in an Interior—a rather misleading title, since nothing in the scene securely identifies the group depicted as a family.1 The title has since been changed to Woman Showing Her Portrait, which restores the spirit of its naming in a nineteenth-century tradition of art-historical scholarship, itself indebted, in the case of this painting, to contemporary French guides to Russian private collections.2
Woman Showing Her Portrait was not exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, as far as we know, and we consequently do not have a title for it that was designated by the artist. Titles can be approximate things, especially when they are applied in retrospect; later Russian catalogues of the Yusupov collection, for instance, variously called the painting The New Portrait or simply Portrait.5
GOETHE'S "The Collector and His Circle"
Woman Showing Her Portrait can be set into a larger context of themes in art production and ideas about art from this period. We have seen that Boilly’s paintings often portray works of art as social agents or instigators of social interactions. This theme, including its foregrounding of the social agency of the female subject in the experience of art, can be related to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) contemporaneous essay “The Collector and His Circle.” The German writer published this piece in 1799 in the Propyläen, a periodical that he founded.15 Like most cultural criticism of the period, its purpose was to educate the reading public, and to that end, Goethe presented visual representation as a means of social transaction: the essay portrays art as an eminently social affair. Paintings, drawings, and prints are seen and discussed in the semipublic domain of a private collector’s house that was open to visitors—one of those residential spaces that blurred the line between public and private spheres of activity during the period. Our understanding of the family’s and visitors’ experiences of art unfolds through the exceedingly social practice of writing letters, for the essay assumes an epistolary form. A key role is played by the collector’s granddaughter, Julie, who is entrusted to complete the correspondence because she has “an excellent memory for events . . . the edge on us in reasoning . . . [and] good will . . . most of all.”16 Julie acts as a guide to the social experience of art; while the practical instruction on art comes from her grandfather, the collector, the social instruction on how to enjoy it and think about its moral and ethical implications comes from Julie.
...In the end, the ballast of power over art remained firmly in masculine hands—the grandfather’s nephew stood to inherit the collection, just as Goethe scripted and ventriloquized this female character for a journal he founded. But it is significant that, much as in Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait, Goethe chose the character of a young woman, who is sympathetically portrayed as a lively, modern intelligence, as pivotal to the reader’s or viewer’s experience of learning about art.
Susan L. Siegfried, Louis-Leopold Boilly: Between Genre and Portraiture," 157-170, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Louis Léopold Boilly, French, 1761 - 1845
Boilly_Louis Léopold: ULAN: 500023946
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1790
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
264283954: UMO Boilly: Between Genre and Portraiture
VIDEO ASSETS
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- National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC~Read a biography of Boilly from the NGA.
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General Description
As a young woman shows off her portrait, an older man examines it—or possibly the woman herself—through the lens of his glasses. Louis Léopold Boilly was a prolific portraitist, and he also frequently included portraits within his genre scenes, as he does here. The appearance of the portrait generates a complex circulation of glances and gestures that do not form a clear narrative or help us decide how the figures are interrelated. The highly finished surface of the painting and attention to the minute details of clothing and accessories are typical of French painting at the end of the 18th century.
Excerpt from
Heather MacDonald, DMA label copy, 2009.
Fun Facts
Archival Resources
Web Resources
Notes
Checked Piction
AFTER EDITING, SEND TMS INFO TO BMAC FOR ARCHIVING
Boilly's long career began during the ancien regime, survived the turbulent years of the Revolution, and continued unabated during the Napoleonic period. Early on he chose to specialize in the area of genre painting, producing images of romantic love affairs that were much in demand during the 1780s. However, when Revolutionary culture condemned such frivolous imagery along with the decadent society of the ancien regime with which it was identified, Boilly abandoned these explicitly gallant themes, and turned for his subject matter to the everyday life of the new social classes that now dominated public life. Boilly's keen, often cruelly humorous depictions of modern life during the first half of the 19th century offer a rich visual account ofthe rapidly changing society in which he lived.
In this early work, Boilly has given us a single scene from a narrative that might be reconstructed in several different ways. At first, we may think that the couple at center has been joined by their family to admire a portrait of the lady of the house that has just been delivered by a servant boy. However, the more one studies the regard of each player, the more peculiar the scene becomes. The aged matron gazes not at the painting,
but at the fresh-faced young woman, while the child at her knees points excitedly at the portrait. Meanwhile, the gentleman at center raises his monocle to one eye, as he squints intently at the young woman's shoulder, as though testing the likeness, not of the portrait to its sitter, but of the sitter to the portrait. The suspicion that Boilly is making light fun of these typically middle-class characters is hard to dismiss, even though the precise object of the artist's habitually rapier wit remains unclear. Could it be that it is the woman herselfwho is being appraised, perhaps through comparison to the engagement portrait that preceded her arrival at the house of her prospective husband? Is the child gesturing at the picture to call attention to the remarkable resemblance between it and the young woman who has appeared before him as ifby magic? We can only speculate, as the small dog at the left corner dares us to understand with his unblinking stare.
This picture, while undated, can be argued to have been executed sometime around 1790 through comparison to another painting by Boilly called The Visit Received (1789, Musee Sandelin, Saint Orner) in which the same figure of the servant boy at the far right of this composition appears. The young woman's costume also suggests a date of about 1790, before the Napoleonic years, when the empire-waisted dress becomes a regular feature of Boilly's genre scenes.
Eik Kahng, The Michael L. Rosenberg Collection (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, n.d.), 28-29.
BOILLY:
A charming little genre scene by Louis-Léopold Boilly, Woman Showing Her Portrait (see fig. 112, p. 159) was painted during the Revolutionary period, when artists were developing a more realistic mode. A little boy has brought in a portrait of a young woman for his family to admire. There is a man admiring her bust, or is he admiring her portrait? It’s hard to tell through his looking glass. The scene is somewhat playful but also gives the sense of a typical bourgeois household of the time. The Boilly painting goes very nicely with a genre scene of the same period in the DMA collection by a not well-known but very talented painter, Pierre Nicolas Legrand: A Good Deed Is Never Forgotten (see fig. 106, p. 150). (22)
Philip Conisbee, "Michael L. Rosenberg's Eighteenth Century," 11-23, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Aileen Ribeiro, The Mirror of History: The Art of Dress in late Eighteenth-Century France," 141- 155, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Approved name format indicated in bold. Title- Woman Showing Her Portrait.
In Louis Léopold Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait (fig. 104), the central figure is a young woman in an outfit clearly inspired by the gaulle, with a muslin skirt over a pink silk dress, a starched white kerchief, and a wide blue sash at the waist. She is shown standing by her portrait, in which she seems to be depicted in a chemise dress. The narrative of Boilly’s painting is obscure. Traditionally, one might have assumed that the young woman was on view as much as the painting was, but the man in black with an English-influenced brown frac (frock coat) seems more a connoisseur of fabrics than of female beauty. Do we see an artist proudly presenting a self-portrait here? This is certainly possible, as an increasing number of women (Vigée Le Brun, for example) were artists in late eighteenth-century France. Formerly known as A Family Admiring a Portrait of a Lady in an Interior, the painting does not make clear who the family members depicted are and what relationship they have to one another. The elderly woman (possibly a widow), seated on the left in an old-fashioned gray dress and plain white linen cap and scarf, may be part of the family or an old honored governess. The boy at her knee (perhaps a grandchild or former pupil) is possibly the son or the younger brother of the putative artist, and he excitedly points out the portrait’s likeness to the elegant young woman.
CHILDREN FASHION...Yet the first practical costume was probably the skeleton suit (so-called because it followed the shape of the body) for boys, which appeared in England in the mid-eighteenth century. By the 1780s, the type had spread to much of Europe, including France. The skeleton suit consisted of a cotton or linen jacket and loose trousers buttoned at the waist and tied with a sash; it was worn with an open, frilled collar, as in Boilly’s painting.
These variant titles usefully highlight the central motif of the painting, a depicted portrait and its role as a dramatic device in this genre scene. The display of the portrait provides a pretext for the social gathering shown here, and the exchanges taking place among the different characters depicted are prompted by their viewing of it as a work of art. The major themes I shall explore in this essay are the interplay between portrait painting and genre painting in French art of this period, and the practice of looking at art as an important form of Enlightenment sociability.
In Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait, a woman displays a portrait of herself to an assembled company. She is twice represented as the object of their gaze and of ours: she appears as an actor in the scene and as her likeness in an oval painted portrait. The collective appreciation of the woman-as- art is enacted by a gentleman who peers at her up close with a pince-nez or a magnifying glass, squinting in an unattractive way that makes him look less like a lover than a connoisseur. For him the portrait is a pretext for connoisseurship of the real living beauty, the woman. Her décolletage, which is repeated in the portrait, suggests where his scrutiny might lead.
With its muted erotic undertones, this painting seems to conform straightforwardly enough to a conventional representation of woman as the object of the (male) gaze. Yet Boilly’s scene is unusual because it puts a woman in charge of her own image: she holds her portrait and points to it, staging its presentation to her intimate circle. The fact that she physically handles the portrait is significant, since women were rarely shown holding artworks of any size, beyond a palm-size miniature.
His unusual coupling of a woman and her likeness in Woman Showing Her Portrait may owe something to an iconographic tradition called the Four Ages of Man. This iconography was usually represented in the form of a cycle or series, in which one scene or canvas was devoted to each age of man.
Boilly, who was an accomplished portraitist, often accorded portraits a narrative role in his galant scenes: delivered, returned, admired, hidden, and crushed, they suffer virtually the travails of his characters.
Boilly’s paintings opened up the categories of portraiture and genre painting by mixing their themes and motifs, and crossing the boundaries and viewing protocols of each. The variant titles given Woman Showing Her Portrait (which was simply called Portrait at one point) reflects this mingling of genres and themes. [MERGED PARAGRAPH]
The Enlightenment has often been described as an intellectual and cultural movement that was fascinated with hierarchy, with creating categories and defining conventions as part of a larger effort to organize knowledge into schemes based on rational criteria. But those categories were also subverted almost as soon as they were constructed, in fine arts much as in other areas of intellectual endeavour and material production. The Enlightenment also thrived on the interplay between sociability and knowledge.
That interplay underpins the subject of Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait and is further activated by the painting itself and the puzzle it poses to an audience to figure out what its subject might be.
TITLE
Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Woman Showing her Portrait (facing page and fig. 112, p. 159) presented something of a mystery when it appeared on the art market in the 1980s and 1990s: the subject of the painting was not entirely clear, nor was its place in Boilly’s oeuvre. When it was acquired by Michael L. Rosenberg in Dallas, Texas, the painting carried the title A Family Admiring a Portrait of a Lady in an Interior—a rather misleading title, since nothing in the scene securely identifies the group depicted as a family.1 The title has since been changed to Woman Showing Her Portrait, which restores the spirit of its naming in a nineteenth-century tradition of art-historical scholarship, itself indebted, in the case of this painting, to contemporary French guides to Russian private collections.2
Woman Showing Her Portrait was not exhibited in the artist’s lifetime, as far as we know, and we consequently do not have a title for it that was designated by the artist. Titles can be approximate things, especially when they are applied in retrospect; later Russian catalogues of the Yusupov collection, for instance, variously called the painting The New Portrait or simply Portrait.5
GOETHE'S "The Collector and His Circle"
Woman Showing Her Portrait can be set into a larger context of themes in art production and ideas about art from this period. We have seen that Boilly’s paintings often portray works of art as social agents or instigators of social interactions. This theme, including its foregrounding of the social agency of the female subject in the experience of art, can be related to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) contemporaneous essay “The Collector and His Circle.” The German writer published this piece in 1799 in the Propyläen, a periodical that he founded.15 Like most cultural criticism of the period, its purpose was to educate the reading public, and to that end, Goethe presented visual representation as a means of social transaction: the essay portrays art as an eminently social affair. Paintings, drawings, and prints are seen and discussed in the semipublic domain of a private collector’s house that was open to visitors—one of those residential spaces that blurred the line between public and private spheres of activity during the period. Our understanding of the family’s and visitors’ experiences of art unfolds through the exceedingly social practice of writing letters, for the essay assumes an epistolary form. A key role is played by the collector’s granddaughter, Julie, who is entrusted to complete the correspondence because she has “an excellent memory for events . . . the edge on us in reasoning . . . [and] good will . . . most of all.”16 Julie acts as a guide to the social experience of art; while the practical instruction on art comes from her grandfather, the collector, the social instruction on how to enjoy it and think about its moral and ethical implications comes from Julie.
...In the end, the ballast of power over art remained firmly in masculine hands—the grandfather’s nephew stood to inherit the collection, just as Goethe scripted and ventriloquized this female character for a journal he founded. But it is significant that, much as in Boilly’s Woman Showing Her Portrait, Goethe chose the character of a young woman, who is sympathetically portrayed as a lively, modern intelligence, as pivotal to the reader’s or viewer’s experience of learning about art.
Susan L. Siegfried, Louis-Leopold Boilly: Between Genre and Portraiture," 157-170, in French Art of the Eigteenth Century: The Michael L. Rosenberg Lecture Series at the Dallas Museum of Art, Heather MacDonald ed. Dallas Museum of Art and the Michael L. Rosenberg Foundation, distributed by Yale University press, New Haven, CT, 2016.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Louis Léopold Boilly, French, 1761 - 1845
Boilly_Louis Léopold: ULAN: 500023946
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
c. 1790
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
AUDIO ASSETS
264283954: UMO Boilly: Between Genre and Portraiture
VIDEO ASSETS
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