In the time of the Revolution he painted a "Triumph of Marat," the tribune of the people, who is being carried on the shoulders of his audience from the _palais de justice_ in Paris, after delivering an inflammatory oration. In 1807, when the exhibition of David's Coronation picture had thrown all Paris into excitement, Boilly conceived the notion of perpetuating in a rapid sketch the scene of the exhibition, with the picture and the crowd pressing round it. His speciality, however, was little portrait groups of honest _bourgeois_ in their stiff Sunday finery. Boilly knew with accuracy the toilettes of his age, the gowns of the actresses, and the way they dressed their heads; he cared nothing whatever about æsthetic dignity of style, but represented each subject as faithfully as he could, and as honestly and sincerely as possible. For that reason he is of great historical value, but he is not painter enough to lay claim to great artistic interest. The execution of his pictures is petty and diffidently careful, and his neat, Philistine painting has a suggestion of china and enamel, without a trace of the ease and spirit with which the eighteenth century carolled over such work. The heads of his women are the heads of dolls, and his silk looks like steel. His forerunners are not the Dutchmen of the good periods, Terborg and Metsu, but the contemporaries of Van der Werff. He and Drolling and Granet were rather the last issue of the fine old Dutch schools, rather descendants of Chardin than pioneers, and amongst the younger men there was at first no one who ventured to sow afresh the region which had been devastated by Classicism. Géricault certainly was incited to his "Raft of the Medusa" not by Livy or Plutarch, but by an occurrence of the time which was reported in the newspapers; and he ventured to set an ordinary shipwreck in the place of the Deluge or a naval battle, and a crew of unknown mortals in the place of Greek heroes. But then his picture stands alone amongst the works of the Romanticists, and is too decidedly transposed into a classical key to count as a representation of modern life. [Illustration: _Gaz. des Beaux-Arts._ BOILLY. THE NEWSVENDOR.] [Illustration: _Baschet._ BOILLY. THE MARIONETTES.]