Getty Museum Acquires L’Entrée au Jardin Turc by Louis-Léopold Boilly
By STAN PARCHIN
January 27, 2010
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| Louis-Léopold Boilly (French, 1761-1845). L’Entrée au Jardin Turc (The Entrance to the Turkish Garden) (1812). Oil on canvas. 73.3 x 91.1 cm (28.9 x 35.9 in.). J. Paul Getty Museum. Photograph provided by Christie's Images Ltd., 2010. |
The J. Paul Getty Museum acquired this morning the painting L’Entrée au Jardin Turc (The Entrance to the Turkish Garden) (1812) by French artist Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845). The composition was purchased from James Fairfax, an Australian retired media executive and prominent collector of Old Master works, at Christie's New York for a record-breaking $4,562,500. Although Scott Schaefer, the Getty Museum's Senior Curator of Paintings, was present at the sale, the actual bidding was conducted by John Morton Morris of Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox.
Louis-Léopold Boilly
Louis-Léopold Boilly, the son of a humble woodcarver, established himself with a small fortune as a Parisian painter in 1785. His diminutive and somewhat risqué genre scenes were influenced by the lascivious lifestyle that characterized the French aristocracy during the Rococo period. As in many of the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings he owned, Boilly recorded his subjects' facial features, gestures, costumes and the like in amazing detail.
In 1794, one of Boilly's mildly erotic works aroused accusations of obscenity by the Société républicaine des arts, an arm of the conservative Jacobin party during the French Revolution. The charge was punishable by a prison sentence and other penalties if convicted. The clever Boilly, also a draftsman and printmaker, escaped prosecution by quickly turning his attention to works of a more public nature, such as the patriotic Triumph of Marat (1794).
L’Entrée au Jardin Turc
Boilly's L’Entrée au Jardin Turc depicts a crowded outdoor scene in Napoleonic Paris. Its action occurs in front of the entrance to the city's famous Jardin Turc. Prior to the Revolution, the establishment's garden, restaurant and café in tented pavilions were reserved for France's aristocracy. The artist chose to portray some 60 leisurely figures, many of them street performers and le Jardin Turc's relatively new middle-class patrons. Boilly inserted his own image, bespectacled and wearing a top hat, in the painting's right edge. The work's far left side includes a portrait of Madame Boilly dressed in white. Like many of the painting's subjects, the artist engages the viewer by steadily looking out from the extremely busy Boulevard du Temple.
Source
Siegfried, Susan L. The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France (exh. cat.). Fort Worth and Washington, D.C.: Kimball Art Museum and National Gallery of Art, 1995.