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Rigaud, Tocqué and the French Rococo Portrait
A Rococo portrait flattered everything except the face. A sitter nobody recognised had paid for nothing.
The silk and the powder were idealised. The likeness had to hold. Nattier's goddesses are the exception that made the rule visible, and two other painters mark the two ends of eighteenth-century French portraiture, each leaving a workshop, a circle and a hundred followers behind him.
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| Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1659 — 1743 | Louis Tocqué, 1696 — 1772 |
| The court formula | The plain likeness |
| Velvet, a long powdered wig, a dark ground, the light picking the face out of the fabric. Rank first, and the sitter within it. | A warm neutral ground, a quiet pose, no mythological costume. The face first, and the dress after it. |
| Same century, same client class, two different things asked of the painter. | |
Rigaud came to Paris from Perpignan and became the portraitist of the Bourbon court. His 1701 Louis XIV in coronation robes is still the most famous image of European monarchy, and he ran one of the largest portrait workshops on the continent. His compositions were multiplied by design, which is why after Rigaud describes a legitimate period practice rather than a later act of imitation.
Tocqué trained in the orbit of Nattier and married his daughter, then took the opposite path. Elected to the Académie in 1734 and summoned to paint the Russian and Danish courts, he gave Queen Marie Leszczynska's plain intelligent face full royal weight in 1740, without a trace of Nattier's goddess treatment.
Dating without a signature
The Wig Is the Clock |
Most eighteenth-century French portraits carry no date and no name. What they do carry is a haircut, and men's hair changed enough across the century to place an oil painting within twenty years or so.
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| circa 1700 | circa 1745 | circa 1775 |
| Curls to the shoulders | Rolls and a bag | Tied at the nape |
| A mass of curls falling over both shoulders, often taking half the canvas. | Horizontal rolls at the temples, the rest in a black silk bag behind. | Close to the head, drawn back and tied with a ribbon. |
| A portrait can lose its name and its signature. It cannot lose its hair. | ||
Schematic, and each style overlapped the next by a decade at either end.
Two terms, two meanings
What After Rigaud and Follower of Tocqué Mean |
Autograph paintings by either man sit in the Louvre, at Versailles and in the great museums, and reach the market only rarely. What comes up instead is the world they created. Period oil portraits by studio hands, circle painters and followers who supplied the enormous French demand for the court look.
After Rigaud points at a composition. It means a period version of a known Rigaud design, made in the decades when royal images were copied on purpose and by arrangement.
Follower of Tocqué points at a manner. It means a painter working in his way, during his lifetime or somewhat later, for clients who wanted that plainer kind of likeness rather than a goddess in silk.
Neither term points at a copyist working from a photograph.
Both describe original eighteenth-century oil paintings by trained professionals, made while the manner they follow was still the manner of the day.
| → | The next questionWhat does a catalogue mean by circle of, or studio of?Seven terms, in order, and what each one claims about the hand that held the brush. |
Sources. Musée du Louvre, and published reference works on French eighteenth-century portraiture and costume.
