At the Entrance

Boilly made his name in the early 1790s thanks to his frivolous scenes that captured the spirit of the late Rococo. After being censured for such subjects during the first years of the French Revolution, he produced a series of patriotic works. He soon returned to genre painting, however, and gained a reputation as a straightforward chronicler of early-nineteenth-century daily life in Paris. In this painting he precisely recorded the fashion of France’s Directory era.