Joseph Boze

Training under Maurice Quentin de La Tour is recorded. The recorded working language is French. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Places of work recorded in the authority are Marseille, Paris and Great Britain. Works named in the authority record are Portrait of Gerrit Jan van Houten (1774-). Work by Joseph Boze is recorded in the collections of Rijksmuseum, Saint-Germain-en-Laye Civic Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and National Portrait Gallery.

Boze was born in Martigues on 7 February 1746, the son of a sailor. He studied painting in Marseille, Nîmes and Montpellier before moving to Paris in 1778. There he became a portrait painter at the court of King Louis XVI, to whom he was possibly introduced to by the Abbé de Vermond, a confidant of Marie-Antoinette at the court. He is believed to have been influenced by Quentin de la Tour. He exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1791, where he received negative reviews. Boze initially supported the French Revolution, having joined the Jacobin Club. He painted portraits of numerous leaders of the Revolution, including Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat, and Camille Desmoulins, and French military officers such as Marquis Gilbert de Lafayette and Louis-Alexandre Berthier. Under the constitutional monarchy he remained loyal to Louis XVI, and in 1792 acted as an intermediary between him and the Girondins. He was arrested as a counter-revolutionary during the Reign of Terror, but was released in 1794. He signed a petition in 1799 to have the name of fellow painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun removed from the list of émigrés. Little is known about his life during the subsequent Consulate and the Empire, though he was attested to be living in Paris's quartier de la Sorbonne in 1805 and 1811. In 1817, he was granted a pension by King Louis XVIII in the Bourbon Restoration. Boze died in Paris on 17 January 1826.

• Illustration — King Louis XVI, c. 1784 • Illustration — Queen Marie Antoinette, 1785 • Illustration — Marquis de Castries, Marshal of France • Illustration — Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Count of Mirabeau, 1789 • Illustration — Jean-Paul Marat, 1793 • Illustration — Profile of Maximilien Robespierre attributed to Boze, c. 1794 • Illustration — Henriette Campan, 1786 • Illustration — Portrait of a French general of division, between 1791 and 1794 • Illustration — Duchess Maria Elisabeth in Bavaria, undated • Illustration — Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Marshal of the Empire and husband of Maria Elisabeth, undated