The Public Viewing David’s “Coronation” at the Louvre

Louis-Léopold Boilly was the great chronicler of Parisian street life in the decades around 1800, a painter of crowded boulevards, theatre foyers, and domestic interiors who survived the Revolution by keeping his head down and his brush busy. Here he records the public pressing in to see Jacques-Louis David’s monumental Coronation of Napoleon at the Louvre, the most discussed painting of the age. Boilly’s gift for capturing expressive faces in dense crowds made him one of the most popular painters of the Directory and Empire, and this work is regarded as the summit of his art.