Louis-Léopold Boilly La Bassée 1761 - 1845 Paris

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Description

Louis Léopold Boilly
An Elegant Interior with a Young Man conversing with an Old Woman, accompanied by a Courtesan ('Le Melon')
oil on canvas

Provenance

Anonymous sale, Paris, Drouot, 4-5 April 1933, lot 13;
Anonymous sale, Paris, Picard, 10 December 1992, lot 31, where acquired by the present collector.

Literature

H. Harrisse, L.L. Boilly, peintre, dessinateur et lithographe. Sa vie et son oeuvre, 1761-1845, Paris 1898, no. 387.

Catalogue Note

This elegant interior, variously known as 'L'Amant raillé' or 'Le Melon', is a relatively early work by Louis-Léopold Boilly, painted shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1785. The existence of a preparatory pencil drawing by the artist on the verso of an oil sketch by Boilly of his father (in a private collection, Paris) points to a dating of circa 1787, the same year in which he married Marie-Madeleine Desligne in Arras.¹ Following his arrival in Paris, Boilly enjoyed a ready market among private collectors for amorous and occasionally moralizing scenes such as the present work, as demonstrated by his series of eight scenes of amorous intrigue, painted from 1789 to 1791 for the Avignon collector Esprit-Claude-François Calvet (1728-1810).

Elegant interiors by Boilly such as this are often not as innocent as they may at first seem, for in most instances they are pregnant with innuendo and erotic overtones, rendered with varying degrees of covertness, designed to appeal to the sensibilité and émotion of his private clients. The lascivious implication of the young man pointing to a sliced melon as he negotiates with the old woman the fruits of her establishment, could hardly be more overt, particularly when reinforced by the gesture of the courtesan herself. Boilly’s flirtations with such plainly erotic scenes (in particular his painting of Lovers and the Escaped Bird, today in the Musée du Louvre, Paris) resulted in his condemnation by the Comité du Salut Public in 1794 for painting subjects "d’une obscénité révoltante pour les moeurs républicaines".

The present composition also exists in a variant by the artist, sold in these Rooms, 17 December 1998, lot 70 (for £80,000), in which the figure group is broadly repeated, yet the artist has omitted the dog and orchestrated something of a scene change to the furniture and accoutrement within his theatrical interior.

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Boilly by Pascal Zuber and Etienne Breton (in preparation).

1. S.L. Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly, New Haven and London 1995, p. 201, note 5.