Pass and Pay

Pass and Pay

That day, as I was walking the halls of the nineteenth-century French paintings on the second floor of the Sully wing, I left the straight line of the Allée Centrale and entered into each of the side chambers devoted to small-format paintings. Unexpectedly, I came across a work that I love and have often referred to, but that I don’t believe I had ever seen in real life: Louis-Léopold Boilly’s The Downpour, or Pass and Pay, painted around 1805 (room 938). An elegant family––the young father in white stockings, the mother dressed in the Directoire or Empire style, a little boy and girl holding their father’s hands, followed by a governess cradling a baby––crosses a muddy Parisian street on a narrow wooden plank that the shoe shiners used to offer to the bourgeois so they wouldn’t dirty themselves too much before a visit. “Pass and pay” was the cry of this Parisian street-profession. An instant later, it is certain that one of the children fell from the plank and was covered in mud from head to toe. These planks, which were fitted with little wheels, are the precursors of the skateboards that kids use to today. When I look at Boilly’s Downpour, I think of Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park.