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拍品專文
The subject of Boilly's ambitious painting was described in detail by the author of the catalogue that accompanied the artist's estate sale, where the picture appeared as lot 10:
"This picture, which so well recalls the scenes of that period when coachmen used to grab passengers by force to make them get into their carriages, is of great truth to life. In the background, one sees the arrival of the Emperor's coach, followed by his horses' grooms."
The subject, then, is the competition among drivers along the Quai to lure by whatever means necessary hapless passengers into their coaches in order to earn the best fares they were able to negotiate. The coucous were old-fashioned, one-horse coaches that were used in Paris to transport passengers from Paris to Versailles, Saint-Cloud and other fashionable spots on the outskirts of the city. They could hold five or six people (uncomfortably) and they were stabled in the Quai des Tuileries.
Boilly depicts several groups of fashionably dressed couples with their children being aggressively approached by coachmen. In several instances deals have been struck and passengers are being helped into the coucous. Boilly takes particular delight in contrasting the rough, darkly dressed coach drivers and and the genteel, fashionably attired couples with children. In the distance, riding up to the Quai from the Pont de la Concorde, is Napoleon's coach accompanied by an elaborate entourage. The various groups of passengers seem oblivious to the Imperial entrance, and it is typical of Boilly's approach to genre painting that the vignette is reduced to contemporary scenography.
Les Coucous sur le Quai des Tuileries was probably painted sometime between the Départ de Paris des Conscrits de 1807 (Musée Carnavalet, Paris) shown at the Salon of 1808 and L'Entrée du Jardin Turc (James Fairfax Collection, Sydney) shown at the Salon of 1812. A watercolor and graphite study of the vignette on the left is signed and dated 1807 (private collection; reproduced in Delafond, op. cit., no. 78) and relates to a large, unfinished drawing on canvas in the Musée Carnavalet (ibid., no. 77). Both drawings are almost certainly early studies for the present painting which was completed sometime later; the changes that Boilly introduced in the final version serve principally to update the women's dresses and bonnets. Three further studies -- one formerly in the Mulbacher Collection, another that appeared at auction in Versailles (28 March 1982, lot 111), and a third with Didier Aaron in the early 1990s -- seem to date from around 1810 and therefore come between the initial studies and the final painting.
The great innovation in the comparatively small group of ambitious, multifigural genre scenes that Boilly produced during the Revolution and Empire -- paintings such as Coaches on the Quai des Tuileries -- was their witty and meticulous focus on the everyday street life of the newly emerging Parisian middle class, with all its pleasures, upheavals and anxieties. No serious painter before Boilly had attempted to record day-to-day life in the radically reordered France of the new regime(s), and none that followed would do it with such sensitive observation and trenchant humor.
The painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Boilly's paintings being prepared by Etienne Breton and Pascal Zuber.
"This picture, which so well recalls the scenes of that period when coachmen used to grab passengers by force to make them get into their carriages, is of great truth to life. In the background, one sees the arrival of the Emperor's coach, followed by his horses' grooms."
The subject, then, is the competition among drivers along the Quai to lure by whatever means necessary hapless passengers into their coaches in order to earn the best fares they were able to negotiate. The coucous were old-fashioned, one-horse coaches that were used in Paris to transport passengers from Paris to Versailles, Saint-Cloud and other fashionable spots on the outskirts of the city. They could hold five or six people (uncomfortably) and they were stabled in the Quai des Tuileries.
Boilly depicts several groups of fashionably dressed couples with their children being aggressively approached by coachmen. In several instances deals have been struck and passengers are being helped into the coucous. Boilly takes particular delight in contrasting the rough, darkly dressed coach drivers and and the genteel, fashionably attired couples with children. In the distance, riding up to the Quai from the Pont de la Concorde, is Napoleon's coach accompanied by an elaborate entourage. The various groups of passengers seem oblivious to the Imperial entrance, and it is typical of Boilly's approach to genre painting that the vignette is reduced to contemporary scenography.
Les Coucous sur le Quai des Tuileries was probably painted sometime between the Départ de Paris des Conscrits de 1807 (Musée Carnavalet, Paris) shown at the Salon of 1808 and L'Entrée du Jardin Turc (James Fairfax Collection, Sydney) shown at the Salon of 1812. A watercolor and graphite study of the vignette on the left is signed and dated 1807 (private collection; reproduced in Delafond, op. cit., no. 78) and relates to a large, unfinished drawing on canvas in the Musée Carnavalet (ibid., no. 77). Both drawings are almost certainly early studies for the present painting which was completed sometime later; the changes that Boilly introduced in the final version serve principally to update the women's dresses and bonnets. Three further studies -- one formerly in the Mulbacher Collection, another that appeared at auction in Versailles (28 March 1982, lot 111), and a third with Didier Aaron in the early 1990s -- seem to date from around 1810 and therefore come between the initial studies and the final painting.
The great innovation in the comparatively small group of ambitious, multifigural genre scenes that Boilly produced during the Revolution and Empire -- paintings such as Coaches on the Quai des Tuileries -- was their witty and meticulous focus on the everyday street life of the newly emerging Parisian middle class, with all its pleasures, upheavals and anxieties. No serious painter before Boilly had attempted to record day-to-day life in the radically reordered France of the new regime(s), and none that followed would do it with such sensitive observation and trenchant humor.
The painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Boilly's paintings being prepared by Etienne Breton and Pascal Zuber.