A Girl at a Window

Around 1799 Boilly made an oil painting that pretends to be a print. It imitates a mezzotint, the velvety black-and-grey kind of engraving, of one of his own compositions, and it is worked almost entirely in black, grey and white, down to the painted mount where he signed his name. A young woman in a white dress and a bonnet sits on a stone window ledge and glances back at us. He surrounds her with things that are hard to paint, a goldfish bowl, a glass bottle, a birdcage, a bunch of carrots and a telescope on a stand, with another lying on the sill. Behind that telescope a boy peers out of the shadow. The stone window, with a carved relief of children below, is a setting borrowed from the 17th-century Dutch painter Gerrit Dou, the master Boilly set out to match.