The Beggar 1822

Louis Léopold Boilly made this print, called "The Beggar", sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century. It shows an old man with a walking stick and a boy holding out his hat. Images of beggars such as this one were common at the time in France. They were part of a broader interest in the lives of ordinary people. But these images were not always neutral, as they often depicted poverty as a moral failing. As France moved from monarchy toward revolution and then empire, the question of who had a right to be represented in art, and how, became hotly contested. Was Boilly creating a sentimental image for bourgeois consumption, or making a statement about the social problems of his time? As historians, we can investigate the context in which this print was made to understand its potential meanings at the time, including, for example, the changing systems of charity or the representation of poverty in popular literature. Art is never made in a vacuum, and its meaning is always shaped by the world around it.