Another drawing of Boilly's father by Boilly dateable to 1810 is in a private collection in France (Boilly, Un Grand Peintre Français de la Révolution à la Restauration, 1989, no. 27, illustrated) and relates to a picture formerly in the collection of Boilly's grand-daughter, Mme Eugène Boilly, in Toulouse, H. Harisse, L.L. Boilly, peintre, dessinateur et lithographe, sa vie et son oeuvre, 1761-1845, Paris, 1898, no. 663. The picture examined by Paul Marmottan in 1909 bore a label on the verso inscribed 'Arnoult Jovite Polycarpe Boilly, mort le 7 janvier 1810 à 78 ans'. Marmottan published an engraving after the picture which is signed and dated 1816, P. Marmottan, Le peintre Louis Boilly (1761-1845), Paris, 1913, pl. III.
Boilly's father, born at La Bassée, began an apprenticeship in wood-carving with Dominique du Thoit in Lille in 1750, and married in Arras nine years later. By Louis-Léopold's birth in 1761, he was maître sculpteur in La Bassée and by the late 1770s he called himself a dealer, and was considered a wealthy man, S.L. Siegfried, The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly, exhib. cat., Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth and elsewhere, 1995, pp. 16-7, note 38.
The present drawing probably shows Arnoult-Jovite-Polycarpe Boilly slightly younger than in the Lille drawing, aged about 65, just at the end of the 18th Century.
The present drawing will be included in Etienne Breton and Pascal Zuber's forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Louis-Lépold Boilly.