Two Young Women Kissing (1790s) by Louis-Léopold Boilly.

Louis-Léopold Boilly

Fathers as nurturers during the Napoleonic era

Portrait of Monsieur Gaudry giving his daughter a geography lesson, 1812, Louis-Léopold Boilly

The Gaudry portrait is even more a portrayal of “the good father” than a lesson in political geography. The painting provides evidence of a reorientation of the father’s role within the family that had taken place from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In her study of archetypal family structures during the Revolutionary period, Lynn Hunt traces “the rise and fall of the good father” and his eventual replacement, as an ambivalent figure, by republican fathers “who were now officially depicted as friendly, supportive, and interested in their children.” While the gradual transformation of the king into a good father began before the Revolution (as manifested in the portrait of Louis XVI, and not a tutor, instructing his son in geography), it was not until the Napoleonic period that a positive image of paternalism was explicitly rehabilitated, as Boilly’s commission for a portrait of the yet-childless Napoleon as père de famille so clearly indicates. In the meanwhile, children assumed new importance as the affective center of gravity in representations of families, a shift that is indicated by the painting’s focus on the demure Mlle Gaudry. Rather than reading the Gaudry portrait in twentieth-century terms, as an expression of “unusual sensitivity and psychological insight,” Boilly’s portrayal of an affectionate and respectful relationship between father and daughter is better understood as conforming to a new social construction of the family that came to the fore during the Napoleonic period, in which fathers assumed new roles as nurturers or guides.

Source: The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France, Susan Siegfried, pp, 115

Louis-Léopold Boilly, Deux jeunes femmes s’embrassant (Two Young Women Kissing), 1790-1794

Louis-Léopold Boilly - Self portrait

Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761–1845) • Trompe l'oeil Tabletop • Before 1793 • Oil on rosewood parquetry • National Trust, Wimpole Hall

‘’Tartini's Dream" (Detail) by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845)

trompe l'oeil (details)

Louis-Léopold Boilly (FR, 1761 - 1845)

Trompe l'œil dit aux dessins et aux savoyards, 1775 - 1825. Louvre

https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010067334

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Trompe_d%27oeil_By_Louis-Leopold_Boilly_in_the_early_1800%27s_%2812413345454%29.jpg

Louis-Léopold Boilly

https://www.boutiquesdemusees.fr/fr/catalogues-d-exposition/le-theatre-des-emotions-catalogue-d-exposition/34463.html

1809 Louis-Léopold Boilly - Little soldiers

(Musée de la Chartreuse de Douai)

Em casa

"Chegava a casa e encontrava um lugar suspenso. A minha mulher sob o candeeiro de petróleo, a sua barriga, o nosso filho a formar-se, a crescer lentamente, a esperar por um momento

José Luís Peixoto, Cemitério de Pianos; pintura de Louis-Léopold Boilly.

La Toilette intime ou la Rose effeuillée (detalle), de  Louis-Léopold Boilly

A Nagasaki black lacquer on metal and aogai inlaid lidded box. Around 1805

Portrait of Napoleon after Louis Leopold Boilly, showing the young Napoleon as the first consul of the French Republic in 1802.

(Lempertz)

Gabrielle Arnault as a Child

Louis-Léopold Boilly

ca. 1815

Au Louvre-Lens, il y avait une expo fort intéressante : “Champollion - La Voie des Hiéroglyphes”, sur l’homme, son époque, l’image de l’Egypte en Europe avant l’Egyptologie....

- gravure de Caroline Hulot d'après Louis-Léopold Boilly - “Le Libéral" et "L'Ultra”

- Charles-Philippe Larivière - "Portrait d'Ibrahim Pacha”

 - Auguste Couder - "Méhémet Ali, Pacha d'Egypte”

- Charles de Steuben - “Portrait de François Arago”

- statue en tailleur du Chef du Trésor Iay - Moyen Empire 1900 av. J-C.

- autel de Philae, inscriptions romaines - 205 av. J-C.