Royal wedding banquet.

Drawing, pen and black ink with black chalk, framing lines in black ink 26,2 x 40 cm, laid paper, signed in pen at lower right "F. Boitard Inventor fecit" (some brown spots, tiny tear at right edge).

François Boitard (1670-1715) was a French Baroque artist. He was a pupil of Raymond Lafage who later followed his style of making drawings and prints. He was known for his rapid and vibrant drawing style. According to one story told by Houbraken, he was able to attract a crowd in a tavern by 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. The present drawing depicts a glamourous banquet in an antique setting. It can possibly be identified as the royal wedding of Alexander the Great in the Persian city of Susa in 324 BC. Alexander intended to symbolically unite the Persian and Greek cultures, by taking a Persian wife himself and celebrating a mass wedding with Persian ceremony along with his officers, for whom he arranged marriages with noble Persian wives.