RAOUX AND DE TROY
Just as Subleyras should be judged by his genre scenes rather than by his scriptural subjects, so Jean Raoux’s (1677–1734) real significance lies in the intimate note he introduced into his fancy portraits, and not in his moderately successful excursions into mythology, like the Telemachus relating his Adventures to Calypso, at the Louvre (No. 764). The Young Woman reading a Letter (No. 765), in the La Caze Room, is perhaps the most charming of many similar pictures from his brush. In sentiment it belongs entirely to the amorous century of Louis xv., which was to produce a Fragonard and a Greuze. Raoux was one of the first French painters of contemporary life. Brought up in the old tradition, he was in his last years influenced by the personality of the great Watteau.
If Raoux was the somewhat sentimental painter of bourgeois life, Jean François de Troy (1679–1752) played not infrequently the chronicler of the elegant life of the leisured classes. Unfortunately this interesting phase of his art is not represented at the Louvre, which, besides the three Portraits (Nos. 886–888) in the La Caze collection, contains two of his famous designs for tapestry, representing scenes from the History of Esther (Nos. 884–885); and his large historical painting, The First Chapter of the Order of the Holy Ghost, held by Henri IV. in 1595 (No. 883).