Musée Ingres-Bourdelle - Portrait du Baron Le Pelletier, prefet de Tarn-et-Garonne - Louis-Léopold Boilly

Louis-Léopold Boilly's 1808 portrait of Baron Le Pelletier, prefect of Tarn-et-Garonne, is a characteristic product of his prolific career as a portraitist of French bourgeois and administrative professionals under the Consulate and Empire. Boilly painted hundreds of portraits of Parisian notables with a smooth, meticulous technique that has more in common with Flemish seventeenth-century portraiture than with the grand Neoclassical manner of David and his followers. This provincial official portrait, housed in the Musée Ingres Bourdelle at Montauban, represents the administrative class that governed Napoleonic France.

Boilly's characteristically smooth, enamel-like finish gives the portrait the precision of a miniature at larger scale. The prefect's official dress is rendered with scrupulous accuracy. Flesh tones are pale and carefully graded, giving the face a slightly porcelain quality. The composition adheres to official portrait conventions without originality.