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Royal Portraits, Made to Be Copied
A royal portrait was not a painting. It was a delivery system. One face, painted once, then sent out in five directions to hang wherever the king could not be, and the copies were the whole point of the exercise.
That is why after Rigaud and studio of describe a legitimate eighteenth-century practice rather than a later act of imitation. The court commissioned the repetition, kept the accounts, and paid for it.
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| Where one royal face went | ||||
| An embassy abroad | A provincial parliament | A ministry in Paris | A loyal noble house | A foreign court, as a gift |
| The copy was not a fake. It was the delivery. | ||||
Three degrees of the master's hand
How a Royal Portrait Workshop Worked |
Rigaud kept account books, and they record for each commission how much of the canvas he painted himself. That is a rare thing to have, and it tells you exactly how the trade was organised.
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| Entirely his hand | The head only | Supervised replica |
| The most expensive line in the ledger, and the rarest. | He painted the face, assistants laid in the velvet, the lace and the ground. | Painted in his rooms, to his design, and sold with his approval. |
| All three left the same door, and all three were period originals. | ||
Four destinies
What Happened to the Copies After 1793 |
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| Burned | Defaced | Hidden | Sold on |
| the public bonfires of the Revolution took the most visible ones | the face slashed or the arms painted out, and the canvas kept | rolled into an attic by a family that meant to bring it back | the identification quietly lost, and the sitter became a gentleman |
| The fourth is why so many unnamed eighteenth-century portraits look grander than their labels. | |||
Three rules
Buying an Antique Royal Portrait |
After is not a warning. On this subject it is a description of how the trade worked. A period canvas after a known royal composition is an original eighteenth-century oil painting by a trained professional, and it was made for a room that needed it.
Look for the passages that were delegated. On a workshop version the face is usually stronger than the velvet and the lace. That is not a fault, it is the division of labour showing through, and it tells you what kind of canvas you have.
Doubt the identification before you doubt the painting. Sitters were relabelled after 1793 and again in the nineteenth century, and the orders on the coat are better evidence than any inscription on the back. The vocabulary is set out in our guide to reading attribution.
In public collections
Where to See Them |
Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV in Coronation Robes, 1701. Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Hyacinthe Rigaud, workshop versions of the same composition. Château de Versailles and Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Jean-Marc Nattier, state portraits of the royal family. Château de Versailles.
State portraiture across three reigns. Château de Versailles, galleries of the Grand Appartement.
| → | The next questionAnd the portraits that lost their names for good?Four ordinary accidents that separate a face from its sitter, and what is left on the canvas. |
Sources. Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles, Museo del Prado.
