Studies of Hands and the Bust of a Young Girl Holding a Plate

Studies of Hands and the Bust of a Young Girl Holding a Plate

Louis Léopold Boilly

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The four delicately modeled studies on this sheet—three of hands and one of the bust and arms of a girl holding a plate—appear to have been used in two different paintings. All three hand studies are preparatory studies for Boilly’s painting, The Game of Billiards, 1807, exhibited in the Salon of 1808 (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, inv. GE 5666). The hand at upper right, bent back at the wrist, was used for the young mother seated on the green bench at lower left in the painting. The hand at upper left of the Met’s drawing, bent forward at the wrist, belongs to the woman in the pink-ribboned hat at the right edge of the canvas. The study at upper center in the drawing is the model for the resting hand of the young woman in white who leans on the edge of the billiard table, watching attentively. The study of the bodice and arms of a young girl, on the other hand, finds a strong echo in the pose and the clothing of the young girl in the green dress in the group portrait of Mme Louis-Julien Gohin, son fils et ses belles-filles (The Ramsbury Manor Foundation, Great Britain, illustrated in Breton and Zuber, 2019, vol.2, cat. 508 P, p.599), although in that composition she holds a book and not a plate.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Studies of Hands and the Bust of a Young Girl Holding a PlateStudies of Hands and the Bust of a Young Girl Holding a PlateStudies of Hands and the Bust of a Young Girl Holding a PlateStudies of Hands and the Bust of a Young Girl Holding a PlateStudies of Hands and the Bust of a Young Girl Holding a Plate

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.