François Boitard

François Boitard (1670 – c.1715) was a French Baroque artist.

Biography

Boitard was born in Toulouse, Languedoc. According to Houbraken he was a pupil of Raymond Lafage who later followed his style of making drawings and prints. He was able to attract a crowd in a tavern with his ingenious method of drawing a complicated version of the Pharaoh entering the Red Sea in two hours, from what appeared to be random scratches on a piece of paper. He copied this trick from Lafage, and Houbraken witnessed it himself in a tavern in London in 1709.^[1]

According to the RKD he lived in Rome during the 1680s and is registered in London in 1709.^[2] He drew many book illustrations and was the teacher of Jacques André Joseph Camellot Aved.^[2] The engraver Louis Peter Boitard was his son.^[3] He died in Amsterdam.