If Italian, possibly by Luigi Boschi, who signed a portrait painting of a man "Luigi Boschi Romano a Siena nel Gennaio 1815", with very similar flourishes in the letters LB. That painting was offered for sale at Bonham's, Knightsbridge, Old Master Paintings, 12 December 2001, lot 355, and had been offered a few years previously at Sotheby's, New Bond Street. When the present picture was sold at Christie's in 1922, LB was interpreted as an attribution to Louis Boilly, but the catalogue's attribution to 'Boilly' without a forename and without dates indicates that a painter in the circle of Boilly was meant, e.g. Eugène Boilly (though why would a picture by Eugène Boilly be signed LB?)
