Louis Leopold Boilly

Louis-Léopold Boilly was the great chronicler of everyday Paris. For decades he painted crowds at the café, the billiard room, the boulevard and the coach yard, full of flirtations, pickpockets and small comic incidents, with the smooth, detailed finish of Dutch genre painting.

Born in La Bassée in northern France in 1761, he was largely self-taught and was selling paintings in his early teens. He kept working through the monarchy, the Revolution, the Empire and after, and painted around 5,000 small portraits, each done in about two hours. At the Salon of 1800 he showed a picture of prints and papers behind broken glass called Un trompe-l’oeil, the first time that term was used for a painting. His Arrival of a Stagecoach in the Courtyard of the Messageries won a medal in 1804. He died in Paris in 1845.

A Game of Billiards is a good place to start: look at each face in turn.