L’Entrée au Jardin Turc (The Entrance to the Turkish Garden) by Louis-Léopold Boilly
The J. Paul Getty Museum acquires important work by Louis-Léopold Boilly
The J. Paul Getty Museum announced the acquisition of L’Entrée au Jardin Turc (The Entrance to the Turkish Garden) by Louis-Léopold Boilly, one of the few important paintings by the artist still in private hands
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January 31, 2010, source: Getty Museum
Crisply painted in glowing colors and teeming with anecdotal detail, Boilly’s picture transports viewers to the heart of Napoleonic Paris, outside the entrance to the city’s most celebrated café, the Jardin Turc. Located in the Marais at 28, boulevard du Temple, the establishment offered its middle-class clientele pleasures once reserved for the aristocracy. Founded in 1780, the Jardin Turc comprised an elegant garden, restaurant, and café housed in a series of tented pavilions whose crescent finials and oriental decor reflected an eighteenth-century taste for turquerie.
“L’Entrée au Jardin Turc is one of Boilly’s greatest paintings, and a brilliant addition to the Getty Museum’s collection,” says Michael Brand, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, in making the announcement. “The rarity of Boilly’s work outside of France, along with the way this painting fits in with other works by the artist in our collection and that of the Getty Research Institute, make this new acquisition a particularly important one for the Getty, as well as for the larger art community in Los Angeles. I am very pleased to be able to conclude this acquisition as one of my last actions as director of the Getty Museum.”
In the painting, Boilly focuses his attention not on the café, but on the spectacle of the crowded street outside. Young and old, fashionable and not, these Parisians take evident pleasure in the novel social promiscuity permitted by the tree-lined boulevard that would come to define the Parisian cityscape.
L’Entrée au Jardin Turc complements the Museum’s collection of early-nineteenth-century French paintings, including Jacques-Louis David’s two splendid portraits, Suzanne Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau (1804) and The Sisters Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte (1821). As a Parisian street scene, L’Entrée au Jardin Turc also foreshadows Manet’s more somber Rue Mosnier (1878), with its walled facades and uneasy mingling of social classes. As a scene of Parisians at leisure, Boilly’s picture anticipates the Impressionist project reflected in Renoir’s La Promenade (1870).
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