Copying from the masters being one of the most hallowed traditions in art education, this is a sketch I made from a drawing by Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845), the great genre artist and portraitist of Napoleonic France. Boilly’s full work is of his family and servants, and this is one of his two sons — although the artist would probably be amused to see that my inadvertent elongation of the boy’s face (an artistic tic I’m trying to rid myself of, not yet successfully) has transformed his cute ten-year-old into a young man of about sixteen. Go here for Boilly’s original, part of an exhibition of eighteenth-century French drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.
