The Card Sharp on the Boulevard

Louis-Léopold Boilly

National Gallery of Art

Fourteen men, women, and children focus their attention on a man fanning out a deck of cards in a town street in the right half of this horizontal painting. More men and women stand in small groups or walk in the left half. The women wear bonnets and long dresses and cloaks. The men wear jackets, slacks, and hats. The people all have pale or peachy skin. The man holding out the cards wears a plumed, bicorn hat, a thick white scarf around his neck, and a long, dark coat. His long gray hair is looped into a knot on his upper back, and a thick white sideburn curls along the cheek we see. He has a prominent nose, thin mustache, and his lips are parted as he faces our left in profile. Glints of gold on his hat and back of his coat could be bells, and he wears a gold hoop earring. A young woman with smooth skin, a low-cut, very pale green dress and matching bonnet reaches out to take a card. Another wearing a mob cap and cloak stands at her far shoulder, and two children stand between her and the cardsharp. A pair of young boys stand with the cardsharp, facing away from us and looking down at the cards. More men and women in earth-toned clothes, some tattered, gather in a tight cluster around a wooden table beyond this grouping. On the table is a metal cup and some glass balls, perhaps marbles. A small, furry, brown dog sits and looks up and to the right with dark eyes in the bottom right corner of the painting. This group is backed by a high wall, presumably enclosing a private garden. Trees reach into the cloud-streaked blue sky beyond the wall. Two more dogs walk among the townspeople who move along the street to the left. Building facades on the far side of the walkway are in shadow, but one is labeled Patissier. The artist signed and dated the painting near the lower left corner, “L. Boilly 1806.”