Le Billiards

Pen and black ink and brown and grey wash over black chalk heightened with white
390mm x 530 mm; 15 3/8 x 20 7/8 in

PROVENANCE
Charles Duits, Dordrecht and London; thence by descent

LITERATURE AND EXHIBITIONS
"A Boilly Drawing", Duits Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3, London, 1964, (Charles Duits ed.), pp. 6-9.
Carlos van Hasselt, Le Dessin Francais dans les Collections Hollandaises, exh. cat., Paris, Institut Neerlandais, 1964, no. 136.
Susan L. Seigfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France, Yale, 1995, pp. 150-57

This complex and beautiful drawing is a preparatory study for Boilly's canvas, A Game of Billiards, dated 1807, which was exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1808 and is now in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Boilly also made two autograph replicas of the picture, one in the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, another whose location is unknown. The Game of Billiards is one of the large set-piece paintings with which Boilly established his reputation as a leading exponent of the neo-classical school. Numerous differences exist between the drawing and the painting. Most notably, Boilly has changed the stance of the lady holding the cue in the centre of the picture, so that she is now seen from behind, provocatively leaning over the table. This alteration must have occurred rather late in the process of composition, since there is a finished study for this single figure in the same pose as in our drawing. Further alterations include the replacement of the Frans Snyders hunting scenes which adorn the walls of the salon in our drawing, with rather more tranquil Vernet-type landscapes in the painting. The boy standing with his father at the centre right has been substituted for a young girl.

Boilly is known not only as a portraitist, but also as one of the most significant painters of everyday life in Napoleonic and post-revolutionary France. He taught himself to paint in Arras before settling in Paris in 1785. Initially, he specialised in scenes of seduction and courtship which combined the playful subject matter of the ancien régime with the post-revolutionary style of David. An example, The Jealous Lover, can be found in the Musée Sandelin, Saint Omar. This work was bought from the artist by one of his new aristocratic patrons, the Marquis de Montesqiou.

Boilly has chosen as his subject the crowded interior of a public billiards hall, which had much the same function as an assembly room in England. There people could meet, eat, drink, gossip, flirt and, of course, play billiards, a new craze from the turn of the century. The room is populated with the haute bourgeoisie at leisure. They are expensively dressed and enjoy costly pleasures such as the hot chocolate that is being served at the left of the sheet. Boilly does not make any moral comment or consciously point to lessons in social behaviour, unlike his great forebear and hero, Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Instead, he is happy to record the activities of middle-class life with the same devotion he gives to recording the faces of his myriad portrait patrons.