BOZE, Joseph

French painter and inventor. He was the son of a sailor and studied painting at Marseille before settling in Arles. In 1778 he moved to Paris, where he studied with the pastellist Maurice Quentin de La Tour. He attempted some technical improvements in the fixing of pastelGLOSSARYA drawing medium of dried paste made of ground pigments and a water-based binder that is manufactured in crayon form. and established a reputation for himself as an engineer and mechanic, his system for bridling and instantaneously unbridling four-horse wagons receiving the approval of the Académie des Sciences when tested at Versailles.

Boze was presented to Louis XVI by the Abbé de Vermont, confessor to the Comte de Brienne and Queen Marie-Antoinette. Thereafter, he had a fairly successful semi-official career executing miniatures and portraits of the royal family and the court, most notably his Louis XVI of 1784 (private collection) and the ravishing Jeanne-Louise Genet, Mme Campan, Marie-Antoinette's Premiere Dame de la Chambre (1786; Versailles, Château). He also, from 1782, exhibited pastels and miniatures at the SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. de la Correspondance, Paris. These are mostly in an oval format and are of varying quality.