Philip Boileau

Philip Boileau was born in Quebec in 1864, the son of a French-Canadian diplomat and an American mother, and studied painting in Europe. He painted society portraits in Baltimore from 1897 and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia before settling in New York in 1902, where ‘Peggy’, a head-and-shoulders portrait of the actress Emily Gilbert, whom he later married, became his first commercial success in 1903. Within a few years the ‘Boileau girl’, a young woman with soft eyes, a cloud of hair and a hint of a smile, drawn in pastel and reproduced as postcards, calendars, prints and magazine covers, was the Edwardian ideal of pretty womanhood.

He painted 34 covers for the Saturday Evening Post between 1907 and his death, and his images, ‘Peggy’, ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Rings on her fingers’, ‘Chums’, were issued by Reinthal & Newman and other publishers in editions that ran into the millions.

Boileau died of pneumonia at his home at Douglas Manor, Long Island, in January 1917, at 52. His original pastels are rare; his signed prints and postcards are collected worldwide, and two monographs, Dorothy Ryan’s ‘Philip Boileau: Painter of Fair Women’ (1981) and Norman Platnick’s ‘Girl of My Dreams’, catalogue his published work.