Auguste Boulard

In 1896 the Paris dealer Georges Petit hung an exhibition of paintings by a man of 71 who had not shown his work publicly in nearly 30 years. Auguste Boulard had sent pictures to the Salon regularly until 1868, then stopped. Critics and collectors came anyway. He died the following autumn at L'Isle-Adam, north of Paris.

He had started early, apprenticed in 1841 to the academic painter Léon Cogniet, and spent time in Antwerp copying Flemish masters. Around 1856 the landscape painter Jules Dupré took him on and drew him into the group working near L'Isle-Adam, among them Corot, Daubigny, Théodore Rousseau and the caricaturist Daumier. From the mid-1860s Boulard settled into peasant interiors and the lives of fishing families, much of it worked up after he moved to Cayeux-sur-Mer on the Channel coast.

Two of his canvases went into the French national collection at the Musée du Luxembourg. One of the interiors, a family at table painted around 1870, is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.