We'll always have Paris:Louis-Leopold Boilly at the National Gallery.

"A walk about Paris will provides lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of life" - Thomas Jefferson.

"Everyone dreams of living in Paris" - Natalie Portman.

"If you can live in Paris, maybe you should" - Alan Furst.

I'd timed it well to start writing about the city of Paris and one of its less celebrated artists, Louis-Leopold Boilly. Between visiting the exhibition on Sunday and starting this blog on Tuesday, the 850 year old gothic cathedral of Notre Dame caught fire and its spire collapsed in the flames. The extent of the damage, at time of writing, is still unknown.

It made me realise, not that I'd really forgotten, that I'd not visited Paris for over twenty-five years and that I'd love to go again. I'd love to organise a walk around the city. My walk would take in the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre, the Champs Elysses, and, of course, the hopefully restored Notre Dame. But that would mean I'd see a very different Paris to the one that Boilly, whose free exhibition, Scenes of Parisian Life, is currently running at the National Gallery.

Boilly (1761-1845), despite living in incredibly turbulent times - he witnessed the French Revolutoin, the Terror, the rise and fall of Napoleon, and both the restoration and overthrow of the Bourbons - focused, for the most part, on the smaller gestures, carnivals, street life, and, if you will, the underbelly of Parisian society. He was a prurient painter too. Something of a lech, if truth be told.

Two Young Women Kissing (about 1790-4)

In 1794, and with France at a point in its history that you may have thought other priorities would have taken precedence, Boilly was accused of 'revolting obscenity' for paintings like Two Young Women Kissing which not only showed a lesbian snog but also a pert bosom poking out. To be honest, it still does it for me now.  

As does Comparing Little Feet, maybe I should get out more? Stocking removal, exposed leg flesh, and even a bit of decolletage. I was curious to work out if there was a difference between decolletage and cleavage so I did a bit of, ahem, 'research'. It seems to be that decolletage is just a fancy French word that means exactly the same thing.

Comparing Little Feet (about 1791)

Before the invention of photography these paintings would provide a useful service for the discerning gentleman masturbator and that's probably why Boilly has not been given the same reverence by art historians as contemporaries like Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Boilly may have been a provider of high end grot but it was still grot.

Or was it? That's a bit harsh on Boilly (whose gimlet eyes certainly lend the air of one not averse to a crafty hand shandy behind the easel) whose painting of drapery, interiors, and the architecture of Paris were carried out with as much passion and panache as those he made of boobs and legs.

Oddly enough, Boilly's greatest private collection is not in France but in the UK. Property developer (Centre Point in central London) and collector Harry Hyams (1928-2015) held all these paintings until his death three years ago and now in Boilly's first ever UK exhibition we can see them all together.

Boilly worked in oil, watercolour, chalk, and graphite and he made art that not only depicted private, intimate moments (as we've seen) but also those that revealed the gaiety, hilarity, boorishness, and just plain oddness of Parisian street life. As the exhibition unfolds we can catch, if we look carefully, images of people stealing kisses, picking pockets, baring their backsides, and, in one instance, taking a slash against an outside wall.

So it seems odd that the painting that caused a sensation was a comparatively tame ensemble piece called The Meeting of Artists in Isabey's Studio! Apparently it rocketed him to fame while acting to promote his work and that of his friends, a selection of artists, sculptors, engravers, performers, and, our old friends, the 'men of letters'.

The Meeting of Artists in Isabey's Studio (1798)

Truth be told, it's very of its time. It's not aged as well as his saucy 'What the Butler Saw' stuff. Or his more traditional interiors even. Grateful Hearts shows a wealthy woman in opulent furs and silks bestowing her largesse on an impoverished family. You can tell a charitable act is taking place by the positioning of the vigilant, and approving, nun to the right of the canvas. However, in full view of a holy person, the man of the house is thrusting his knee between the posh lady's legs in what very much appears to be an attempt to instigate some mild frottage. Grateful hearts - but a hugely ungrateful, and inappropriate, libido.

Grateful Hearts (about 1790)

The Little Chapel (about 1803-4)

To Pass, You Pay (about 1803-4)

Further charitable acts are carried out in The Little Chapel, almost as if Boilly is trying to make amends for his prurience by showing us his generosity. In To Pass, You Pay we see Boilly make further points about class and how the rich and poor coexist in large cities like Paris. A duckboard has been set up to enable the rich to cross a muddy street without soiling their finery but a man in more humdrum attire demands payment for his services. Viewers of the artwork are left to make their own judgement on the validity of his service and, indeed, the morality of allowing some people to be so much richer than others.

In 1832's A Carnival Scene, Boilly (now in his seventies) really lets rip and shows us a panorama of many of the different types you could find on the Paris streets of the early nineteenth century. Having lived through many regimes, this painting is meant to symbolically bring them all together but it doesn't really matter if you don't get that or, like me, you're not particularly well versed in French history.

You can just enjoy the painting on its own merits. There's so much detail in it that the guy in front of me at the exhibition was ever so slowly scanning along it and filming it on its phone. There are dogs with masked tails, bared backsides, horn blowers, and (I've zoomed in myself) jesters, harlequins, a man dressed as a monkey, and, most terrifying of all, a tiny little Stanley Johnson.

A Carnival Scene (1832)

A Carnival Scene (detail) (1832)

A Carnival Scene (detail) (1832)

The Poor Cat (1832)

Boilly was fond of a crowd scene. 1832's The Poor Cat makes good use of chiaroscuro (check out the contrast between the gloomy background characters and the bright pink dress of the lady with her back haughtily turned away from us in the foreground) whilst The Barrel Game (1828) seems to show an altogether more working class scenario. 'Jeau du tonneau' was a popular amusement in 18c Paris and involved throwing iron discs into holes on the surface of a table. It was 154 years before the launch of the Atari TV game and even then you only got Combat free with the console so I guess this had to suffice.

The Barrel Game (about 1828)

Portrait of the Comtesse Francois de Sainte-Aldegonde (about 1800-15)

But it was Boilly's sensitive side that that provided the bulk of his income. His portrait of the Comtesse Francois de Sainte-Aldegonde was one of five thousand he made during his career. It seems unlikely that any of the soldiers, Napoleonic nobility, or lawyers could have been a match for the Comtesse.

Of course, considering financial imperatives, there's a high possibility that Boilly was in the business of flattery. But, leaving that aside, it's a wonderful painting of a person that, even two centuries later, appears very alive to us. Her piercing and inquisitive eyes looking out at us and dressed fashionably but not ostentatiously. I think I've got the hots for her.

Madame Louis-Julien Gohin, her son and her stepdaughters (about 1800-2)

A Girl at a Window (after 1799)

Other times his portraits acted as trompe-l'-oeils. In fact it was at this exhibition that I discovered that Boilly actually invented the term trompe-l'oeil (a trick of the eye) so that's probably his greatest claim to fame. A Girl at a Window is certainly a good one. You don't need a set of those 3D glasses they used to give away with the TV Times to get the impression of the drapery and cane poking out of the frame.

Another trick that Boilly liked to employ, another string to his bow, was his ability to make an image in one medium appear as it was made in another. A Young Girl holding her Dog is made using chalk but appears like a print or an engraving.

A Young Girl holding her Dog (about 1797-8)

It's a neat, if slightly pointless, trick but it's not as a good as another trompe-l'oeil that you find just before you exit the exhibition. The 1812 crucifix of ivory and wood is, of course (or maybe not), actually oil on canvas - but its illusory natures tricks us into thinking that it's three dimensional initially. Then, just to show off it seems, Boilly has attached his name and address on some kind of primitive business card, also looking 3D, aside the crucifix. 

It's as if to say that Boilly may have been a holy man, he may have been a slightly pervy man, he may have been a great painter, and a keen observer of street life, but, most of all, it seems, it says that Boilly was a businessman. Perhaps the fact he did so well in life means the fact that, for the most part, he's been lost to history is something we shouldn't be too worried about it. He came, he saw, and judging by some of his paintings, he came again. Then he mopped himself down and laughed all the way to the (wank) bank.

A Trompe-l'oeil Crucifix of Ivory and Wood (1812)