Louis-Léopold Boilly

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is unlined and still on its original stretcher. The paint layer is stable and in very good condition. The painting is probably clean. There are a few retouches in the right and shadowed side of the coat, on the shadowed side of the face, behind the collar in the background on the left and in the forehead in the upper right, upper left and above the eyebrow on the left. These retouches are quite well applied and do not point to any real condition issue. The restoration could be reexamined and possibly slightly improved, but the work could also be hung in its current state.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Boilly's production of small, finely finished bust length portraits were amongst his most lucrative and popular accomplishments.  The artist himself charged a reasonable 120 francs per piece¹ and their variety is staggering: from celebrities, to soldiers, to matrons, to children-- the range offers such a cross section of Parisian society from about 1800, when he started producing them, to 1829, when he retired from painting, that they almost seem to capture the era better than any other monument of the age.  Boilly painted them on standard size canvases, each measuring about 22 by 17 centimeters, which had distinctive stretchers with a rounded cross-bar, as seen in the present example, which still retains its original chassis (see fig. 1). 

The best of these small portraits were painted with the dexterity and insight that he employed in his genre pictures, and the present painting is an excellent example.  It depicts an elderly man, slightly turned to the right, wearing a pair of metal spectacles.  The sympathy and the skill with which he is painted suggests that the sitter may have been a friend of the artist, although the old (possibly original?) inscription on the reverse of the stretcher which presumably would have identified the sitter has been difficult to decipher.  It does, however, date the picture precisely.  The Latin inscription "dipinctus pridie/ kalend. maii. 1807"  notes that it was  painted on the day before the calends (or first day of the month) of May, thus April 30, 1807.

The present work has been inspected first hand by Etienne Breton and Pascal Zuber, who will include it in their catalogue raisonné of the works of Boilly, in preparation.

1.  See S.L. Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France, New Haven and London 1995, p. 117.