Compositional Drawing for 'Entrance to the Jardin Turc'

Download4000 × 3067 px View on a wall Edit

Artist: Louis-Léopold Boilly (French, 1761–1845)
Medium: Brown ink and graphite
Size: 27.9 × 38.1 cm (11 × 15 in.)
Culture: French
Museum: J. Paul Getty Museum
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

This drawing represents an idealized street scene in Napoleonic Paris, just outside a popular café called the Jardin Turc (Turkish Garden). This stretch of boulevard is where people from the café would have spilled out into the street, and it would have been an exciting place to be, just decades after the French Revolution. People from all walks of life could finally mingle without the degree of class distinctions that had previously stratified society.

Depicted in this action packed scene are several key groups of figures that literally seem to stand out in the crowd. Two small boys who are street performers-- a marmot showman and an organ grinder/puppeteer--gain the attention of a wealthy couple and an audience of women and children, respectively. The backdrop of café walls and more distant figures are covered in washes of ink. The foreground figures are left light in tone (the same as the paper) so that they appear spot lit, and thus singled out for attention.

This is Boilly's preparatory sketch for a painting of the same subject, which is also in the Getty Museum collection. The drawing includes many subtle differences from the painting, suggesting that the artist had a practice of often inserting motifs into fully developed compositions. For example, a toy horse trailing behind the organ grinder in the drawing becomes a dog in the painting.

Text: J. Paul Getty Trust, CC BY 4.0.