Portrait of a Lady, possibly Madame Boilly (nee Adelaide Leduc)

Description

Gallery Rotation Fall 2013
Louis-Leopold Boilly
France, 1761–1845
Portrait of Lafayette (?)
1761–1845
Pastel on vellum
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Irving F. Burton, 1973/2.41
Julien-Leopold Boilly
France, 1796–1874
Portrait of a Lady, possibly Madame Boilly (née Adelaide Leduc)
1814
Black and red chalk, heightened with white chalk, on brown paper
Museum purchase, 1972/2.375
Unlike the formal engraved portraits by Karl Dujardin (1622–1678) and Laurent Cars (1699–1771) on the other side of the case, which were disseminated in prints and thus available to a wide audience, these two drawn portraits of middle-class sitters are intimate in character. Both are remarkable for the rendering of textures and attention to detail, as well as for the treatment of light. The portrait of the man, perhaps the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), a hero of both the American and the French revolutionary wars, was created by the remarkable portraitist and genre painter Louis-Leopold Boilly. Although the sitter’s blue coat and the background may have been retouched at some point, the face retains its integrity. The better-preserved portrait of the woman was completed by Boilly’s eldest son, the painter, lithographer, and engraver Julien-Leopold Boilly. The sitter is traditionally identified as the artist’s mother, Adelaide-Francoise-Julie Leduc, who would have been thirty-six years old at the time the portrait was completed.