The first exhibition in the UK of an artist who almost lost his head in the French Revolution, and whose paintings survived the biggest domestic art and antiques raid in UK history, will be seen next year at the National Gallery in London.

The paintings by Louis-Léopold Boilly were all owned by the late property billionaire Harry Hyams, who changed the London skyline forever when he built the Centre Point tower in the 1960s.

In 1964 he paid what now seems a derisory sum, £650,000, but was then a record price for a beautiful 17th-century Wiltshire mansion, Ramsbury Manor. He filled the house with art and antiques but it remained one of the most private homes in England, viewable by the public only from a bridge half a mile away.



In 2006 the Johnson Gang, who over 20 years were responsible for a string of raids on stately homes and antique shops, rammed a ground floor window of the house with a four-wheel drive and escaped with a record haul of more than 300 pieces valued at over £30m. Only some of the loot was recovered, with many pieces damaged. Five members of the family later received prison sentences of up to 11 years.

Hyams died in 2015 and left £450m in his will to establish a trust to finally make his home and collection public. The house will not open for at least another 18 months, but the small exhibition of 20 Boilly paintings in London is the first glimpse of its treasures. Curators at the National Gallery said that not only had the pictures never been exhibited before, most had never been photographed or catalogued.

Boilly, renowned for his meticulous technique and minutely detailed works, had been titillating the wealthy with suggestive pictures of partially clothed beauties, when the French Revolution made such art deeply suspect.

According to art history legend, the authorities broke into his studio looking for more evidence against him – and instead found his painting of the revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat being carried shoulder high by an adoring crowd throwing their hats in the air and holding up children to see him. Marat himself would famously be stabbed to death in his bath, but the artist was spared, and lived until 1845, with a lucrative career in landscapes, portraits, and trompe l’oeil – a term used to describe his convincingly 3D works, including views of the backs of canvases and stretchers.

His street scenes teeming with detail, including one that will be in the exhibition showing jolly crowds gathered for a carnival in 1832, record Paris during the rise, reign as emperor and fall of Napoleon, and the restoration of the monarchy.