Louis-Léopold Boilly

Louis-Léopold Boilly (French: [lwi leɔpɔl(d) bwɑji] ; 5 July 1761 – 4 January 1845) was a French painter and draftsman. A creator of popular portrait paintings, he also produced a vast number of genre paintings documenting French middle-class social life. His life and work spanned the eras of monarchical France, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Empire, the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. His 1800 painting Un Trompe-l'œil introduced the term trompe-l'œil ("trick the eye"), applied to the technique that uses realistic imagery to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects exist in three dimensions, though the "unnamed" technique itself had existed in Greek and Roman times.

Life and career

Boilly was born in La Bassée in northern France, the son of a local wood sculptor. A self-taught painter, Boilly began his career at a very young age, producing his first works at the age of twelve or thirteen. In 1774 he began to show his work to the Augustinians of Douai who were evidently impressed: within three years, the bishop of Arras invited him to work and study in his diocese. While there, he produced a cascade of paintings – some three hundred small works of portraiture. He received instruction in trompe-l'œil painting from Dominique Doncre (1743–1820) before moving to Paris around 1787.

At the height of the revolutionary Terror in 1794, Boilly was condemned by the Committee of Public Safety for the erotic undertones of his work.