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Collecting 18th-Century French Portraits
The most famous portrait in French history was a present the king kept for himself. Rigaud painted Louis XIV in his coronation robes in 1701 to be sent to the king's grandson in Madrid. Louis liked it too much to let it go.
That is the eighteenth-century French portrait in a single anecdote. An industry the academy ranked just below history painting, run out of workshops that turned out likenesses by the thousand, and organised from the start around the idea that one face could be painted more than once.
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| Who was having themselves painted, and when | ||
| 1701 | 1740s | 1780s |
| The crown and the court | Magistrates and bankers | Actresses and philosophers |
| Painted for reasons of state, at full length, with columns and drapery. | Painted to prove an office and a fortune, at half length, in a private room. | Painted to prove they had arrived, in ovals and busts small enough to hold. |
| The clientele widened across the century, and the canvases shrank as it went. | ||
That is why the eighteenth-century French portrait a collector meets today is a bust on a canvas of twenty inches and not a king in ermine. The great portraitists ran busy workshops, their manner was copied across France and Europe, and the oil paintings that survive in real numbers are the ones that were made in real numbers.
Three things to look at
Dating an 18th-Century Portrait Without a Signature |
Most eighteenth-century portraits carry no date and no name. They do carry a haircut, a coat and a canvas size, and each of the three narrows the window.
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| The hair | The great full-bottomed wig cascading over both shoulders belongs to the age of Louis XIV and lingers into the 1720s. From the 1730s, smaller powdered wigs with rolls at the temples and the hair tied behind. By the 1780s many younger sitters wear their own hair, powdered and simply dressed. | |
| The dress | Lace jabots, velvet coats and the robe à la française carry the mid-century. The muslin chemise dress, made fashionable and briefly scandalous by Marie Antoinette, marks the 1780s. Sober dark cloth with a high collar has crossed into the Revolutionary years. | |
| The format | Full length with columns and drapery was for royalty. Bust and half length, on canvases of 16 by 20 up to 24 by 30 inches, served private clients and is what a collector mostly meets. Ovals gained favour from the 1760s. | |
| Three readings, and a canvas is placed within twenty years without a document in sight. | ||
Those smaller formats were made for the private apartments of townhouses, rooms about the size of a modern living room. That is why an eighteenth-century French portrait sits so naturally in one.
Three rules
Buying an 18th-Century French Portrait |
The face and the hands. These went to the most skilled hand in the workshop. Fabric and background could be delegated, the likeness could not. Quality in the face is the quickest test an oil portrait offers.
Honest age. A canvas of this date has almost always been relined and shows old restoration. That is conservation history, not damage. What matters is that the face, the most vulnerable passage, reads well.
The painting, not the label. Attribution language describes probability, not quality. A superb follower reads better on a wall than a weak autograph work, and it always will. The seven terms are set out in our guide to reading attribution.
The Revolution and after
Where the Century Ends |
The Revolution ended the world these portraits served, but not the craft. Painters trained under the old system kept working for a new clientele of citizens, officials and merchants, and the manner of Louis-Léopold Boilly, precise, small in scale, quietly elegant, shows how French portraiture stepped into the nineteenth century without losing its polish. A cabinet portrait of the 1800s is often the same trade, on a smaller canvas, with the powder gone.
In public collections
Where to See the Masters |
Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV in Coronation Robes, 1701. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Louis Tocqué, Portrait of Marie Leszczynska, 1740. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Nicolas de Largillière, Portrait of a Woman. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Jean-Marc Nattier, portraits of the daughters of Louis XV. Château de Versailles.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette with a Rose, 1783. Château de Versailles.
Louis-Léopold Boilly, small portraits and genre scenes. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille.
| → | The next questionWhich two painters set the manner the rest followed?Rigaud and Tocqué, the court formula against the plain likeness, and what after and follower of mean on a canvas. |
Sources. Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lille.
