Entrance to the Jardin Turc

Painted in a limpid Neoclassical style, Boilly’s picture transports us to the heart of Napoleonic Paris, where we stand outside the entrance to one of the city’s most celebrated cafés, the Jardin Turc. Café-goers crowd the doorway, spilling out onto the sun-dappled street and mingling with Parisians of every social condition, all engaged in the business and pleasure of modern leisure. Located in the Marais at 29, boulevard du Temple, the Jardin Turc offered its middle-class clientele delights once reserved for the aristocracy—culinary delicacies, a shady park, gaming tables, and musical entertainment.¹ The establishment, founded in 1780, comprised an elegant garden, restaurant, and café housed in a series of tented pavilions whose crescent finials (visible at left) and orientalizing decor reflected an eighteenth-century taste for turquerie.² Boilly captured the place at its apogee, one year after new management had converted the former ice cream parlor into a lavish dining room overseen by chefs who had worked in noble households before the Revolution.³ A wild commercial success, the Jardin Turc spawned numerous imitations and represented for many Parisians the democratization of luxury, rendering public formerly private pleasures.⁴

But in Boilly’s scene, we have not penetrated the exotic realm of the garden cafe, whose feathery treetops suggest a deep and tempting prospect at right. We have not passed through the crowded gate, over which an ornamental gilt “Turk” presides, cross-legged, at left. Instead, the artist has chosen to place us on the south side of the boulevard, directing our attention not so much to the scenery as to the spectacle of the crowded street outside the café. Young and old, fashionable and not, Boilly’s Parisians take evident delight in the novel social promiscuity permitted by the tree-lined boulevard, an eighteenth-century innovation that would come, over the course of the nineteenth century, to define the Parisian cityscape.⁵ The image conforms closely to contemporary prints representing the café’s thronged entrance (fig. 1), which served as a key landmark along the boulevard du Temple, the city’s new entertainment corridor.⁶ Featuring theaters, restaurants, and cafés, the street attracted large crowds, making it an early site for the modern pastime of people watching. Among the first truly public places in Paris where one went to see and be seen, the boulevard thus provided Boilly with the atmosphere of self-display and spectatorship that he took as his painting’s theme.

Fig. 1. Jazet after Philibert-Louis Deboucourt, La promenade du Jardin Turc, 1810. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département des éstampes et de la photographie, QB-201 (170)-FT 4, Hennin, 13330

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Ladies in stylish Empire-waisted gowns brush elbows with housemaids in their aprons, and men in gleaming beaver hats mix with street urchins. Class membership finds sartorial expression but always within the context of social harmony; this is a vision of Napoleonic Paris as a fashionable utopia. Two young boys, likely immigrants from the regions of Savoy (left) and Catalonia (right), furnish the afternoon’s principal entertainment.⁷ The Savoyard carries a wooden box tied around his neck, having taken from it a live marmot, whose bright eye and tiny paw Boilly rendered with economical finesse. The boy is a montreur de marmottes, a recognizable type of juvenile street performer in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Paris; Watteau’s painting of a similar figure hangs in the Hermitage Museum (fig. 2). The sweet-faced montreur hands around his hat, hoping to make some money off the café’s chic customers, while to the right his partner entertains a group of children hardly younger than himself with music and a puppet show.⁸ Cranking a hurdy-gurdy with his right hand, the boy deftly dances two marionettes strung from his knee. His air of quiet concentration and the rapt enjoyment of his little audience give the vignette special poignancy.

Fig. 2. Antoine Watteau, Savoyard with a Marmot, France, 1716. Oil on canvas, 40.5 x 32.5 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, inv. ГЭ-1148.

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Painted with the tender precision of a seventeenth-century Dutch fijnschilder, or “fine manner” painter, these figures nevertheless belonged to a contemporary cast of boulevard characters, of which the nineteenth-century viewer might count himself a part. “There is movement and truth in [Boilly’s] compositions,” wrote one Salon-goer in 1814; “one feels as though one recognizes his characters.”⁹ A more cynical contemporary observer remarked, “M. Boilly is blessed with the ability… to capture and caricature Parisian fashions and manners. His Jardin Turc attracts the crowd through this knack for truthfully tracing our absurdities; in it, each of us recognizes his neighbor.”¹⁰ Thus, for contemporary audiences, the painting might serve, like a stroll down the boulevard du Temple, as an exercise in visual recognition, a knowing game of exchanged glances.

As if to underscore the importance of sight and spectatorship, Boilly punctuated his composition with figures who, as Susan Siegfried has remarked, “by returning our gaze … seem to say they know we are staring at them.”¹¹ From under the gate a bareheaded man looks back at us, and from the ticket window a young girl does the same; a lady in an elegant feathered bonnet at center turns smiling toward us, as does a widow to the right of the tree.¹² Finally, at the rightmost edge of the canvas, Boilly himself, in spectacles and a top hat, looks steadily out of the picture plane in a small but penetrating self-portrait.¹³ At the time when he painted this picture, the artist resided in the rue Meslay,¹⁴ not ten minutes’ walk from the Jardin Turc, and thus his insertion of this portrait indicates his own membership in the neighborhood’s community of spectators.

Although born in 1761 into a modest northern French provincial family, Boilly had managed, by dint of painterly skill and commercial ingenuity, to establish himself as a comfortable Parisian bourgeois by the turn of the century. The son of a wood sculptor and minor art dealer, Boilly received his initial training from his father, Arnould, before leaving home for the larger town of Arras, where his study of trompe l’oeil technique instilled a lasting taste for exacting finish.¹⁵ At Arras, he set up shop as a portraitist and turned out an astonishing total of over three hundred small, highly finished portraits between 1778 and 1783. Having garnered a modest fortune and a considerable provincial reputation for the refinement and speed of his work, he moved to the capital in 1785.¹⁶ In Paris, Boilly painted precious genre scenes for a largely aristocratic clientele. These diminutive, jewel-like pictures reveal his debt to seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish masters, whose work Boilly, like many of his French contemporaries, collected avidly.¹⁷ Sentimental and episodic, his pictures from this period also bear comparison to those of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Honoré Fragonard and, like their work, often carry a mildly erotic, “gallant” subtext. These boudoir scenes met with considerable commercial success, if little official esteem; within the Académie Royale de Peinture’s hierarchy, such pictures ranked far below history paintings.

The Revolution brought radical changes to arts administration in France; the biennial Salon, where formerly only members of the Académie had been permitted to exhibit, was opened to all submissions in 1791—a momentous change for Boilly, who immediately recognized in these exhibitions a new platform for self-promotion.¹⁸ Threatened by the Jacobin Société républicaine des arts, which resented his aristocratic clientele and regarded as decadent his gallant subjects, Boilly painted his first large-scale street scene, a patriotic Triumph of Marat in 1794 (Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts). The work served both to placate the revolutionary authorities and to demonstrate Boilly’s ability to produce pictures of greater ambition and scale.¹⁹ Although he would continue to paint small, private genre scenes throughout his career, from this point on, Boilly’s most important works concerned themselves with Parisian public life, or, perhaps more accurately, with Parisians’ private lives lived in the post-Revolutionary city’s new public spaces: its streets, parks, cafes, and theaters. A canny commercial strategist, Boilly capitalized on the marketing potential afforded by the Salon, which attracted crowds and press coverage. The large-scale, multifigure compositions he showed at the Salons enjoyed tremendous popular success and, even when they failed to sell, nonetheless helped attract clients for his smaller pictures on the private market.²⁰ A famously swift and precise worker, Boilly increased his productivity and profits by recycling successful figures and groups from his Salon paintings in smaller cabinet pictures, harnessing a practice common among eighteenth-century genre painters to new entrepreneurial ends. A certain resulting repetitiveness in Boilly’s work—the family likeness of his sloe-eyed women, the recurrent figural groupings—sometimes attracted the sarcasm of Salon critics who dismissed his pictures as mere documents of contemporary fashion, works of imitation, rather than invention.²¹

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In addition to the peril of monotony, Boilly’s recycling ran the risk of fragmentation when discreet compositional units failed to coalesce into a unified scene. Entrance to the Jardin Turc can be parsed into innumerable vignettes, several of which—the puppet show, for example (figs. 3 and 4)—resurface in other pictures by the artist.²² Close comparison of the painting with a recently discovered compositional drawing (fig. 5) demonstrates Boilly’s method of dropping readymade figures and groups into his scenes. The self-portrait at right, the seated man at center, and the standing woman in profile at left all seem to have been extracted, fully formed, from earlier works and inserted into the scene once Boilly had devised its overall structure.

Fig. 5. Louis-Léopold Boilly, Entrance to the Jardin Turc (preparatory drawing), ca. 1812. Pen and ink and graphite on paper, 28 x 38 cm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011.22

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Closer comparison of painting and drawing provides further insight into Boilly’s working methods.²³ Whereas the finished picture describes the facade with evident fidelity, the drawing treats the architecture in summary fashion, indicating the café’s name above the door, along with its street address²⁴ and its offer of “Déjeuneur—chaud et froid.” There are noticeable changes of pose: the marmot, for example, migrates from its box in the drawing to the arms of the Savoyard in the painting. There are also substitutions: the young girls beside the tree do not figure in the drawing; the toy horse visible behind the puppeteer in the drawing becomes a dog in the picture; and an old woman at the center of the drawing is replaced in the painting by a man borrowed from another composition.²⁵ There are also important additions: neither the little girl with the bunch of grapes at the center right of the picture nor the woman in a lace bonnet seated beside her husband at right appears in the drawing. Nonetheless, the passage that most clearly indicates the relationship between drawing and painting involves a waiter, who appears in the upper right background of the drawing, carrying a tray on the café terrace. An infrared scan of the painting (fig. 6) reveals that Boilly originally included the figure before changing his mind and covering him with foliage. This subtle modification signals a larger reconfiguration that turned the focus of the finished painting away from the interior activity of the café itself and toward the boulevard instead.

Fig. 6. Detail of infrared reflectograph showing underdrawing and pentiment of a waiter.

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What prevents the picture—despite Boilly’s habit of swapping motifs in and out—from disintegrating into a series of disconnected episodes—what makes the whole more than a sum of its parts—is Boilly’s mastery of light. Washing down from an indeterminate source at the upper left, afternoon sunlight gently bathes the crowd in its radiance. The effect is almost theatrical, transforming the boulevard into a brightly lit proscenium stage; Boilly’s Parisians become actors, playing their roles in a carefully stage-managed production. It is this element of theatricality, of harmoniously orchestrated artifice that sets Boilly’s rendering of modern street life apart from the project of Charles Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life.” As a precocious flâneur, a connoisseur of the boulevard, Boilly anticipated the Impressionists by over half a century, but his supreme control—in his arrangement of figures, his orchestration of lighting effects, and, most of all, his immaculate painted surface—connects his work to an older tradition. Like the figure of the little Savoyard, a marmot nestled in the crook of his arm, Entrance to the Jardin Turc harks back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The picture remains suspended somewhere between the fairgrounds of David Teniers and Édouard Manet’s Music in the Tuileries—an image of contemporary sociability that can be classified as neither a picturesque fantasy nor a deadpan report.

• Emily A. Beeny
  September 2012

Appendix

Related Studies and Drawings:

• Compositional Study for the Entrance to the Jardin Turc. Pen and ink on paper, 28 x 38 cm (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011.22): this drawing, with few alterations, outlines the picture’s composition.
• Profile of a Young Woman’s Head. Oil on paper on canvas, 25.7 x 22.2 cm (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, inv. M.2000.179.33): this sketch, likely a portrait of Boilly’s first wife, lends her profile to the standing lady in white on the left.
• Portrait Study of Jean Duplessi-Bertaux. Oil on paper laid down on canvas, 17.6 x 15.4 cm (Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, inv. 366): originally made in preparation for the 1798 group portrait A Gathering of Artists at Isabey’s Studio, this study of the artist Duplessi-Bertaux reappears in the figure of a seated man at center.
• Study of a Little Boy. Oil on canvas, 31 x 18 cm (location unknown): this figure becomes the standing child who observes the marmot at center.
• Study of a Boy and a Girl. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown (private collection): these standing figures appear to the right of the puppet show group.
• Study of Children with a Marionette. Sepia wash on paper, 14 x 19 cm (location unknown): this study, reversed, furnished the motif of the hurdy-gurdy player and audience.
• Study of a Young Savoyard, a Man, and a Seated Woman. Oil on canvas, 46 x 33 cm (Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon): this group appears at left in the painting.
• Study of a Leaning Woman. Oil on canvas, 21 x 15 cm (location unknown): this figure is used for the woman with a red shawl watching the puppet show.
• Study of a Little Hurdy-Gurdy Player. Black chalk and gray wash on buff paper, 13 x 18.9 cm (private collection): this sketch includes a finished drawing of the hurdy-gurdy player with the boy and dog beside him added in outline.
• Study of the Facade of the Jardin Turc. Drawing, dimensions unknown (London, private collection): this sketch was certainly made in preparation for the painting.
• Study of a Dog. Pastel on paper, 22.3 x 29.4 cm (Dijon, Musée national Magnin, inv. 1938 DF 468): this dog appears in the arms of a child watching the puppet show at center.

• A Gathering of Artists at Isabey’s Studio, 1798. Oil on canvas, 71 x 111 cm (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 1290 bis): this picture shares with Entrance to the Jardin Turc the seated figure of Jean Duplessi-Bertaux.
• A Family Party, 1803. Oil on canvas, 33 x 27 cm (Boulogne-sur-Mer, Musée du château, inv. 35 L): this picture includes the profile of Mme Boilly reproduced in Entrance to the Jardin Turc.
• Young Savoyards Showing a Marmot, 1807. Oil on panel, 23.5 x 32 cm (location unknown): this picture includes the same montreur de marmottes.
• L’Entreé du Jardin Turc (ricordo), 1812. Watercolor, dimensions unknown (location unknown): following contemporary practice, Boilly often made scaled-down ricordi of his large Salon compositions.
• Tavern Scene, ca. 1815. Oil on canvas, 37 x 47 cm (Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF1936): this picture includes the same marionette performer.
• The Marionette Performance. Oil on paper, 41 x 47 cm (Paris, Kugel collection): this picture includes the same puppet show group.