Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Boilly has long been recognized as the most significant painter of everyday life in Napoleonic France, one whose portraits and genre scenes provide delightful illustrations of the period. In this book Susan Siegfried argues that Boilly's paintings should be read not just for their documentary detail but also for their wider cultural significance--for the light they shed on social and sexual tensions of the era.

According to Siegfried, Boilly viewed the Revolution not as a political event but as a force that redefined social attitudes and behavior. His paintings of street scenes contained a new middle-class imagery of modern life. Boilly avoided the straightforward narratives and focused composition of contemporary history painting, and there was a deliberate ambiguity in his paintings that reflected his own uneasy position within the middle class. His paintings also reveal his distinctive interest in spectatorship and the act of viewing, and Siegfried contends that his work represents a peculiarly modern politics of spectatorship and involves us in a self-conscious dialogue between picturing and viewing. In fact, says Siegfried, Boilly's representation of women and boys as highly eroticized objects raises important issues of gendered viewing. Boilly emerges in this innovative study as an intriguing figure who fashioned new pictorial formulas that appealed to connoisseurs of his era and of ours and whose works illuminate important aspects of life in France after the Revolution.

This beautiful book will accompany an exhibit on Boilly to be held at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Siegfried is the curator of this exhibition.

Published in association with the Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the National Gallery of Art, W

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Siegfried, research projects manager at the Getty Art History Information Program, provides an interesting, if not uniformly convincing, analysis of the entrepreneurial artistic career of Boilly. She demonstrates Boilly's repositioning of genre painting to both profit from and satirize contemporary societal mores, particularly the status of women through the Revolutionary and Restoration periods. His life and work are discussed in six thematic chapters that reflect current theoreticocritical preoccupations by delving into contextual sociopolitical issues, the reception--no less than the intention--of his painting, the emergence of art as commodity, and matters of narrative and gender. This organization tends to diminish comprehension of iconographic and stylistic development, but it does illuminate the subject and the period to make an important contribution to the extant literature. The text is readable but could be more concise. The illustrations are excellent, especially the numerous color plates, which ably display Boilly's remarkable, greasily idealizing style. Although the book lacks a bibliography and catalog of pictures, its endnotes supply extensive reference to primary and secondary source material and are reinforced by a good index. Of greatest use for faculty and graduate students, the book will serve a wider audience of cultural historians. R. W. Liscombe; University of British Columbia

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Susan L. Siegfried is research projects manager at the Getty Art History Information Program.