Louis-Léopold Boilly La Bassée 1761 - 1845 Paris

This impressive drawing was surely executed by Boilly as a work of art in its own right.  The sheet is filled by the elegant figure of the young mother wearing a shimmering taffeta dress, embracing her child who stands on a stone bench.  The main figures are largely drawn in a highly finished manner, with a subtle use of contrasting black chalk and stumping and white chalk, and a few invigorating touches of red chalk in the face of the woman, while the much more loosely drawn background creates a highly atmospheric setting. 

The subject is 'a groundless fear', a type of subject familiar from a number of Boilly's paintings, such as The Dead Mouse, now in the Wallace Collection, London (see S.L. Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Leopold Boilly, New York Haven and London 1995, p. 171, fig. 146).  In the present drawing the reason for the child's fear is left to the viewer's imagination. As Siegfried points out, 'The narrative incident in many of Boilly's vignettes of mothers and children is an intrusion into the safe enclosure of the domestic sphere, the latter signified by mother's embrace'.  The importance of the event depicted is in the emotion it creates, the fear of the child often arising from a trivial occurence but providing a pretext for an embrace.