Louis-Léopold Boilly - Monochrome masterpiece

A painting that is pretending to be a print.

This highly unusual portrait from French artist Louis-Léopold Boilly is painted entirely in tones of black, white and grey . . . giving us a work which seems to foretell black and white photography, despite being created almost three decades before the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made his first p…