(b La Bassée, nr. Lille, 5 July 1761; d Paris, 4 Jan. 1845). French painter and printmaker. Boilly painted portraits, domestic and genre scenes, and also scènes galantes that brought him into disrepute at the time of the Revolution. Generally he worked on a small scale, with a smooth and meticulous technique. He was extremely prolific, claiming to have produced 5,000 portraits. In the 1820s he took up lithography and used this technique to popularize his scenes from contemporary life.