An unusual feature of these royal portraits is that seven of them are life-size, a feat which had not been previously attempted.
It had become the fashion to hang these portraits in rich frames at the top of the high wainscots used in those days, and the very large size adopted by Nanteuil made of them decorative panels which held their own even in a roomful of paintings. Many of the nobles must have owned complete sets. They met with such favor that during the last four years of his life the artist engraved entirely in that size, about twenty-two inches by thirty, and had started a gallery of all the great men of France; he had actually produced as many as thirty-six before he died in 1678. The list includes the portraits of the Queen Mother Anne of Austria, decked out in all her finery a few weeks before she died, that of the young Dauphin, the effeminate brother of the King the Duc d’Orléans, Colbert, Turenne, Louvois, Bossuet, the Duc de Chaulnes, and several other celebrities. They are admirable plates in which he secured broad masses and simple effects by means of the same system he used in his small portraits. In spite of the very large surface and what seems like a million lines there is no confusion, not a flaw in the unity of his composition. They had formed the special admiration of the last Medici Duke of Tuscany when, on a visit to France, he had insisted on meeting Nanteuil. From him he purchased for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence the portrait of the painter himself and those of the King and Turenne. He moreover obliged him to accept a pupil dans l’intimité, a thing which Nanteuil had never done for he always locked himself up when he engraved his plates. It was that Domenico Tempesti who has left us such an interesting record of the habits of the engraver and the ideas he held on the subject of portraiture. It is from him that we know that the master made all those delightful pastel portraits in three sittings of exactly two hours each. Would that we knew how long it took him to engrave them! we can only form a vague idea of this from the fact that in his most prolific year he made fifteen engraved portraits. Robert-Dumesnil limits to ten the portraits engraved entirely by Nanteuil; the selection he makes is judicious, but the number was certainly far greater. Of course the purely mechanical draughting of the frame and the filling of the background was the work of assistants, and it is more than probable that in many of the less important plates and in the life-size portraits, on account of the great surface to be covered, the costume was engraved by such pupils as Pitau and Van Schuppen, for instance, as their cleverness for such work almost equaled their master’s. But in all the small portraits and those of Turenne and the Ducs de Bouillon, for instance, we recognize everywhere the vigorous yet tactful touch of Nanteuil himself.
Nanteuil. Jean Chapelain
Engraved in 1655 from Nanteuil’s own drawing from life
Jean Chapelain, born at Paris, December 4, 1595, died February 22, 1674. His mediocre poem “La Pucelle” brought him much more renown than the “Iliad” brought to Homer. It was Chapelain who corrected the first poems of Racine.
Size of the original engraving, 10⅝ × 7½ inches
Nanteuil. Pompone de Bellièvre
Engraved in 1657 (when Nanteuil was twenty-seven years of age) after the painting by Charles Lebrun. By many authorities it has been described as the most beautiful of all engraved portraits.