Painter

Boilly was perhaps the most important of the French genre painters in the late 18th and early 19th century, and his small paintings depicting modern life were extremely popular with his contemporaries. Here he shows a woman painter in her studio, surrounded by the many attributes of the art of painting. The Painter is a characteristic example of Boilly's early work, containing distant echoes of the mannered rococo style. The pretty, doll-like face of the artist with its charmingly sly smile, her gracious pose and coquettish turn of her head all recall paintings of women by Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard, while the attributes in the studio recall Chardin's still-lives on the subject of the attributes of the arts.