1807
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Two Standing Figures (Study for A Game of Billiards) is a 1807 by Louis-Léopold Boilly, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
This painting shows two men standing side by side, dressed in early 1800s clothes. Their poses look casual but focused. One rests a hand on a surface. The other holds something small in his hand. Boilly often sketched figures first like this before putting them in bigger scenes. He paid close attention to how people stood and held things. These studies helped him build lively crowd scenes later. Look up Louis Léopold Boilly (French, 1761–1845) if you want to see how he turned these sketches into full paintings.
Louis-Léopold Boilly made these two figure studies for his painting A Game of Billiards (see photo). In the final composition, the left figure from the study appears toward the right end of the billiard table, and the other figure appears at the left end. Boilly's genre scenes like A Game of Billiards-animated with a variety of participants-made him the premier chronicler of Parisian life from the Revolutionary to the Restoration periods. In the drawing, Boilly concentrated on the isolated figures, simply sketching in rudimentary lines for legs and the table and carefully examining light…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Louis-Léopold Boilly was a French painter and draftsman. A creator of popular portrait paintings, he also produced a vast number of genre paintings documenting French middle-class social life. His life and work spanned…
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