Portrait of Mme Vincent

(Louis-Léopold Boilly)

Provenance: M. Kinen, Paris, by 1989; Andre Weil, Paris; Rene Fribourg, New York; his sale, Part II, Sotheby’s, London, June 26, 1963, lot 71B; Dr. J. Singer, 1963-4; Private Collection. Literature: Henry Harisse, L-L Boilly, Peintre, Dessinateur et Lithographie, Sa Vie et son Oeuvre, Paris, 1989, cat. no. 838

Although Boilly is today prized for his remarkable genre scenes painted in le gout hollandais, he also specialized in trompe l’oeil and portraiture. From the start of his career, around 1778, until the turn of the century, Boilly only rarely painted portraits in a format other than bust-length on a canvas measuring 22 by 17 cms, many examples of which are known today. It is the rare three-quarter length (Lucille Desmoulins, 1791, Musee Marmottan, Paris) or full length portraits ( Robespierre, c. 1789, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille) which proves the exception

Around 1800, however, Boilly began to vary his portrait format. While continuing to paint the small-scale busts, he introduced larger full and three-quarter length portraits in which he placed his sitters, for the first time, in landscape settings. The Portrait of Antoine-Thomas-Laurent Goupil (location unknown), the famous group Portrait of the Christophe Philippe Oberkampf Family before the Jouy Factory (Private Collection), and the beautiful pair of an unknown man and woman in the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille are all examples of this new type. Our Portrait of a Lady joins this group. Besides the format and setting, new too is the porcelain finish and the crisp drawing. With such portraits Boilly adopts an aesthetic, perhaps best characterized as ‘Ingresian’, in which the high finish of the Dutch ‘little masters’ and the portrait style of Ingres are united. Great attention is paid to small details of jewelry, costume, and tailoring and to the accessories which mark social rank. Our Portrait of a Lady is depicted in all the nervous refinement expected of an upper bourgeois of the early Romantic era. Harisse, in his catalogue raisonne, calls our portrait simply Jeune Femme, and the identity of the sitter continues to resist identifications despite the tantalizing inscription on the stretcher which reads Mme Vincent amie de Boilly. A collector named Vincent, about whom little is today known, owned a significant number of Boilly’s paintings, and these were dispersed at his sale on January 24, 1877. Unfortunately, no picture matching the description of our portrait appears to have been in his collection, and nothing is known of his wife.

Inscribed on the Stretcher: Mme Vincent amie de Boilly.

Matthiesen Gallery & Stair Sainty Matthiesen