Head of a man in profile composed of six female nudes

A renowned genre painter and prolific portraitist, Boilly trained in the esoteric field of trompe l’oeil painting, under the guidance of Guillaume- Dominique Doncre in Arras. This unusual portrait indulges this enduring interest in playful and carefully crafted imagery: it shows a man in profile, his features composed entirely of the cleverly entwined bodies of six women. There is a long history of experimenting with composite elements to create entirely new images, and in Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593) the genre found arguably its greatest protagonist: he achieved remarkable success with his anthropomorphic portraits, their curiosity and creativity proving immensely popular in subsequent centuries. One picture formerly given to Arcimboldo, the Portrait of Herod (Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum) shows a head in profile made up of numerous children, in reference to the story of the Massacre of the Innocents. This portrait, possibly after a lost Arcimboldo, is perhaps the first of this type of portrait to bring together and manipulate bodies to create the profile of a man. In eighteenth and early-nineteenth century France, there was a renewed vogue for such anthropomorphic or so-called ‘hieroglyphic’ pictures. A satirical, and slightly gruesome, portrait of Napoleon I, called Triumph des Jahres 1813, showed the Emperor in profile, his features made up of the bodies of soldiers, a reflection on the heavy human cost of his military campaigns. It was an extraordinarily successful image, and many variants were produced throughout Europe.

While the circumstances of the original commission behind Boilly’s small portrait are not known, it is most closely related to the satirical engravings that appeared during the French Revolution. A pamphlet that was published in 1791 under the title Les fouteries chantantes ou Les récréations priapiques des aristocrates en vie showed the heads of political figures made up of nude women and explicit imagery, a particularly scathing form of political mockery used as a weapon against ancien régime defenders, such as Jean-Sifrein Maury (fig. 1).

This picture will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Boilly’s paintings being prepared by Etienne Breton and Pascal Zuber, to whom we are grateful for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.