François Boitard (1670 - c.1715) was a French Baroque artist.
Boitard was born in Toulouse. According to Houbraken he was a pupil of Raymond Lafage who later followed his style of making drawings and prints. He was able to attract a crowd in a tavern with his ingenious method of 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. He copied this trick from Lafage, and Houbraken witnessed it himself in a tavern in London in 1709.[1]
According to the RKD he lived in Rome during the 1680s and is registered in London in 1709.[2] He drew many book illustrations and was the teacher of Jacques André Joseph Camellot Aved. The engraver Louis Peter Boitard was his son. He died in Amsterdam.