Two Standing Figures (Study for A Game of Billiards) (c. 1807): Art, History and Details

Two Standing Figures (Study for A Game of Billiards) (c. 1807) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Louis Léopold Boilly (French, 1761–1845).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Louis-Léopold Boilly made these two figure studies for his painting A Game of Billiards (see photo). In the final composition, the left figure from the study appears toward the right end of the billiard table, and the other figure appears at the left end. Boilly's genre scenes like A Game of Billiards-animated with a variety of participants-made him the premier chronicler of Parisian life from the Revolutionary to the Restoration periods. In the drawing, Boilly concentrated on the isolated figures, simply sketching in rudimentary lines for legs and the table and carefully examining light effects on the upper part of the men's suits.

Object facts

• Title: Two Standing Figures (Study for A Game of Billiards)
• Date: c. 1807
• Creator attribution: Louis Léopold Boilly (French, 1761–1845)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: black chalk with gray and brown-black chalk, with stumping, framing lines in brown-black chalk
• Dimensions: Sheet: 31.2 x 26.6 cm (12 5/16 x 10 1/2 in.); Overall: 31.2 x 27.3 cm (12 5/16 x 10 3/4 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.382

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Shepherd Gallery. Non-Dissenters : One Hundred and Seventy French Nineteenth Century Drawings, Pastels and Watercolors. New York: Shepherd Gallery, 1976.
• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.