Louis-Léopold Boilly was born in 1761 in the village of La Bassée, near Arras, the son of a woodcarver. From 1775 the boy lived in Douai with a relative, a prior of the Augustine order. It is not known who gave Boilly his first training. A very early practice of portrait painting, partly self-taught, seems to have launched him into his profession. By 1779 he was at work in Arras, busy with portraits. In 1785 he moved to Paris, where two years later he married Marie-Madeleine Desligne, the daughter of a merchant of Arras. His family portraits, conceived as intimate domestic scenes, attracted the attention of a provincial noble of literary bent, Calvet de La Palun, who commissioned him to paint a series of narrative genre subjects based on texts furnished by himself. From 1791 onward Boilly regularly exhibited portraits and genre scenes at the Paris Salons. When private patronage dwindled after the outbreak of the Revolution, he sought to reach a wider popular audience by painting boudoir scenes, of mildly licentious character, to be reproduced in quantity by the printmakers. A lukewarm supporter of the Revolution, he was denounced in 1794 to the Société Républicaine des Arts by a fellow artist, the Jacobin zealot Jean-Baptiste Wicar (1762-1834), for having painted "obscene works revolting to republican morality." The denunciation was forwarded to Robespierre's Comité de Salut Publique. At the height of the Terror this was a life- threatening accusation, of which Boilly managed to clear himself by painting Triumph of Marat (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille), which appeased the revolutionary thought-police. His wife had meanwhile succumbed to the anxiety caused by these alarms. Remarried in 1795, Boilly benefited from the pacification resulting from the fall of Robespierre.

Portraiture, having launched him on his career, remained to the end his most dependable source of income. His facility in executing small portraits rapidly and cheaply enabled him to be productive on an almost industrial scale, rivaling the output of the photographers of later generations. By 1828, well before the end of his career, he could claim to have painted more than five thousand portraits, each completed in about two hours. In searching for ways of capturing likenesses with speed, he tinkered with optical devices that, in turn, helped him to develop the illusionist techniques by which he brought off the spectacular feats of trompe-1'oeil still-life painting that astonished Salon audiences and irked the critics.