The Arrival of the Stagecoach

In 1803 anyone travelling to Paris by public coach was likely to end the journey in one courtyard, the yard of the Messageries on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, the terminus of the national coach service. Boilly painted the moment of arrival there. A heavily loaded stagecoach has pulled up in front of the long Messageries building, and the passengers are climbing down into the arms of families who came to meet them. A soldier stands at the left, and dogs and cockerels poke about in the foreground. It is a crowd of ordinary Parisians, each doing something slightly different, which was exactly the kind of picture Boilly was known for. He showed it at the Salon of 1804. The French state bought it at auction in 1845, the year he died, and it now hangs in the Louvre's Boilly room.