THE PORTRAIT PAINTERS
The two great portrait painters who flourished under the “Grand Monarque,” Rigaud and Largillière, were preceded by an artist to whom, perhaps owing to the relative scarceness of his works, history has done but scant justice. Whilst the Louvre contains thirteen portraits by Largillière and seventeen by Rigaud, only two pictures stand to the name of Claude Lefebvre (1632–1675); but his Portraits of a Master and his Pupil (No. 529) and the Portrait of a Man (No. 530), are distinguished by a penetrating insight into character and an incisive vigour of style that form a striking contrast to the shallow bombast introduced even into portraiture by the fashionable painters to the Court. Lefebvre has been compared with Van Dyck. The Portrait of a Man (No. 530) has more in common with the brilliant audacity of Frans Hals’s brushwork. Lefebvre worked for some years in London, where he was a favourite at the Court of Charles ii.
Rigaud’s manner of portraiture has none of these serious, manly qualities, but his skill in arranging the sumptuous accessories which play so important a part in his portraits,—as important, at least, as the actual features of the sitters,—secured him the patronage of the pomp-loving, haughty nobility. Hyacinthe Rigaud y Ros (1659–1743) was born at Perpignan and educated at Montpellier and Lyons. It was the advice of Le Brun that saved him from the customary pilgrimage to Rome and its inevitable consequences. It was Le Brun who recognised Rigaud’s bent for portraiture, and launched him on the brilliant career which gained for him the title of “the French Van Dyck.” Rigaud was enormously productive. Between 1681 and 1698 he is said to have painted six hundred and twenty-three portraits. And he had then another forty-five years before him!
Rigaud’s best known picture at the Louvre is the stately portrait d’apparat of King Louis XIV. (No. 781), a life-size full length, in which the spirit of the time, the curious blending of supercilious haughtiness, love of display, and affected grace of manner, are happily expressed in the monarch’s attitude and in the whole setting. The picture is signed and dated, “peint par hyacinthe rigaud, 1701.” The same tendencies are to be noted in the full length Portrait of Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux (No. 783), in which it is surprising that the prelate’s personality is not completely smothered by the splendid profusion of the accessories. His gifts appear, however, in a better light in his excellent Portraits of Marie Serre, the Artist’s Mother (No. 784), with the same head, honestly and soberly painted, twice on the same canvas, once in sharp profile looking to the right, and again, facing this, a three-quarter profile to the left. Wholly unexpected is the delicacy and softness of one of his pictures in the La Caze Room: the Portrait of the Duke of Lesdiguières as a Child (No. 792). His solitary excursion into the domain of “grand art” at the Louvre is at the same time his last work: The Presentation in the Temple (No. 780), which in grouping and lighting owes much to the study of Rembrandt.
Nicolas de Largillière (1656–1746) was born in Paris, but was taken when still an infant to Antwerp, where he became a pupil of Goebouw. From 1674 to 1680 he worked in London as an assistant of Sir Peter Lely, from whom he acquired the clever tricks and mannerisms in the painting of draperies and the textures of silks and velvets and other materials, which were to form so important a part of his artistic equipment. After Lely’s death Largillière went to Paris, where he not only shared with Rigaud the patronage of the Court as portrait painter, but secured many important commissions for historical paintings which, perhaps to the advantage of his fame, are now all but forgotten. Largillière was not without distinction as a brilliant and daring colourist. Nor was he incapable, on occasion, of seizing the subtleties of his sitters’ character. But his praiseworthy qualities are more than balanced by his unpleasant affectations and by the baroque squirminess of his line. This tendency carried him to such insufferable excesses as the conglomeration of lumpy bosses which does duty for a hand in his Portrait of M. Du Vaucel (No. 484), in the La Caze Room.
His boastful skill in the management of the satins and velvets in the overrated portrait group of Largillière with his Wife and Daughter in a Garden (No. 491), cannot atone for the singularly unfortunate and clumsy composition, and for the self-conscious affectation of each individual pose. More satisfactory, in spite of the superabundance of accessories and outward pomp, which in this case is a fitting attribute to the character of the sitter, is the Portrait of Charles Le Brun, First Painter to King Louis XIV. (No. 482), who is depicted in a colossal wig, seated before an easel, and wearing a superbly painted red velvet cloak.