LARGILLIÈRE, Nicolas de

It is by his portraits that Largilli�re is esteemed. Effective as a portraitist of groups and able to achieve in single portraits grandeur or intimacy, depending on the circumstances, he remained impressively consistent in artistic quality. He was in his seventies when he portrayed so delicately and perceptively Elizabeth Throckmorton in her habit as a Blue Nun. Pale-complexioned, pensive, and felt as distanced from the world, she is also very much a living presence, with liquid eyes and scarlet mouth, the colour of which is almost startlingly vivid amid the austere white fabrics that enfold her.

Images of members of Catholic cloistered or semi-cloistered religious orders are numerous in post-Tridentine Europe. Rubens, Vel�zquez, and many of their followers painted imposing portraits of nuns. Philippe de Champaigne made a specialty of portraits of religious figures.

This painting is a typical portrait in the Rococo style of the eighteenth century.

Largilli�re was an expert portraitist. With La Belle Strasbourgeoise he demonstrated wonderful skill in rendering textiles (gray lace and black satin) and employed the provincial hat to superb compositional effect.

Largilli�re also painted pure landscapes - or landscapes peopled only by such minute, unimportant figures as can be deciphered, just, in this autumnal woodland Landscape, which looks backward to Rubens and forward to Fragonard. There is real poetry in its vigour, and a delight in the wildness of nature, in towering trees and rich foliage, which makes one regret that this aspect of his art is so rare. Combined with his still-lifes and with the fascinating trompe l’oeil decorations of his own house, it helps to explain contemporary appreciation of him as a ‘universal’ painter.

Although Largilli�re is mainly known as a portrait painter, he painted also still-lifes, about 50 during his long career.

In 1683 Largilli�re was accepted into the Academy, and in 1686 he submitted as his Diploma work the portrait of Le Brun, now in the Louvre. In this work he applies his Flemish methods to producing what is one of the most typical portraits of the Grand Si�cle. He creates a new genre, the state-portrait of an artist. Up till this time artists had usually painted themselves without any particular setting or apparatus. Some Flemish and Dutch painters are shown at work in their studio, surrounded by the actual furnishings of the place. Poussin had created a unique classical model with a background of mainly blank canvases, a sort of abstraction of a studio. Largillierre depicts Le Brun surrounded not by the actual appurtenances of a studio, but by objects symbolical of his achievement - the classical casts on which he based his style, the sketches for or engravings after his most celebrated works - just as in a royal portrait the King is shown with the attributes of the Monarchy.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau (1671-1741) was a French dramatist and poet who enjoyed great popularity in the witty and decadent Parisian society of his day. The nonchalant realism of this portrait is a style that Largilli�re helped develop.

Formerly considered as a self-portrait by Pierre Parrocel (1670-1739), now it is attributed to Nicolas de Largilli�re.

In France, during the decades of 1660-80 few painters had devoted themselves exclusively to portraiture, which was considered of secondary importance. The personages of the time liked if possible to be shown in action, for instance as victorious general, or at least surrounded by appropriate and allegorical embellishments. But after about 1685 several important artists appear who specialized in portraiture and who created a new fashion in this field. The essential novelty of their style is the introduction of the technique and patterns of the Flemish school, particularly of van Dyck.

The oldest of these painters was Fran�ois de Troy who was soon outshone by two more brilliant painters of the same generation, Nicolas de Largilli�re and Hyacinthe Rigaud. Many of the works by these two artists belong in spirit and in date to the eighteenth century, but both made important contributions to the development of French painting well before 1700, and they must be considered as helping to create the transition from one century to the other. Both contributed to the elimination of the style of the Grand Si�cle, both belonged to the party of Colour; but in certain other respects they are sharply opposed: in their clent�le, their naturalism, and in their relation to the painting of the Netherlands.

Together with Hyacinthe Rigaud, Largilli�re was the most sought-after French portrait painter of the early 18th century, giving the aristocratic formal portrait developed by Rigaud a sober, more realistic aspect, complementing the magnificent poses and incidental detail with a lifelike rendering of the face.

In this portrait of an unidentified sitter in a somewhat extended head-and-shoulders view, the subject looks out, calm and self-assured, his noble features framed by the luxuriant full-bottomed wig and loosely-draped purple robe.

Fran�oise Gere-de Rance was the second wife of Fran�ois Honorat de Beauvilliers, (1607 – 1687), Duc de Saint Aignan. She attended the court of Louis XVI and Madame de Maintenon at Versailles.

By the end of the 1680s Largilli�re received regular orders from the richer bourgeois of Paris. In 1689 he received a new type of commission, for one of the portrait-groups which the City of Paris caused to be executed to commemorate certain solemn occasions. In this case the theme was the banquet given by the �chevins to the King when he made his first formal visit to the H�tel de Ville, as a gesture of forgiveness to the city for their part in the Fronde. The painting was destroyed at the Revolution, but is known from several sketches. The present canvas in the Hermitage is a preparatory sketch for the huge painting, now lost.

The sketch shows the �chevins seated in front of a table deliberating on the statue of the King to be erected at the H�tel de Ville to celebrate their pardon. In the middle of the table is a bust of Louis, and on the wall behind hangs a vast canvas of the banquet itself. The whole is a Baroque version of the Dutch corporation group, with the naturalism and psychological insight of the latter abandoned in favour of freedom in gesture and movement and dramatic effect in grouping.

Largilli�re painted many portraits of himself. A number of these works were replicated, some more than once. In the present portrait, the fifty-year-old artist is seated in his studio. On the stone shelf behind him is a still-life composed of articles commonly found in an artist’s studio: a rectangular wooden palette, paint-stained brushes, and an array of plaster, terracotta, or marble sculptures, all but one of which are small in scale. The most prominent is the reduction of the full-length statue of a young male nude commonly called the Antinous (Vatican Museums, Vatican). Largilli�re had already used the Antinous as a prop in his portraits of Charles Le Brun and Nicolas Coustou.

This painting depicts a still-life with grapes, pomegranates and figs on a stone ledge.

Largilli�re’s normal handling of paint is matched by a freedom and naturalness in the settings of many of his portraits, with often gracefully rustic, open-air scenery anticipatory more of Gainsborough’s portraits than of any vein of later French portraiture. The Portrait of a Family has about it an informality and relaxation which the rich costume of the mother and daughter cannot disguise, unsuitable though it appears for such a deeply countrified location. The father, with his gun, dead game, and lively-eyed hound, is more suitably set. But all this is a tribute to the sensitivity of Largilli�re’s response - to the setting as much as to his human sitters. He ‘portrays’ the rugged bark of the oak tree at the right of the composition and the curling shapes of its russet-tinted leaves with a directness unprepared for in French painting.

The painting represents the leading French sculptor, Nicolas Coustou, friend of the painter. In his early sixties, the sculptor is seen relatively undressed but for his powdered wig. He points to the stone in the foreground from which his Spring will be carved in 1712, its model to the left.

By the end of the 1680s Largilli�re received regular orders from the richer bourgeois of Paris. In 1689 he received a new type of commission, for one of the portrait-groups which the City of Paris caused to be executed to commemorate certain solemn occasions. In this case the theme was the banquet given by the �chevins to the King when he made his first formal visit to the H�tel de Ville, as a gesture of forgiveness to the city for their part in the Fronde. Unfortunately, the painting was destroyed at the Revolution, but is known from several sketches.

Seven years later Largilli�re executed a second commission of the same kind of which the finished picture survives. It was ordered by the city for the church of Saint-Genevi�ve to commemorate the intervention of the patron saint to end a drought in 1694. In this composition the artist has combined northern and southern methods. In the poses and draperies of the lower figures Largilli�re follows the portrait convention with which he had already scored such success; but in its general conception the composition is an adaptation of a much-used formula for Baroque altarpieces in which saints are replaced by the �chevins and the Virgin by St Genevi�ve.

In this painting portraiture is blended with religious art, in a whole which is one of the most completely Baroque work of the period. Largilli�re looks not only back to Barocci but forward to Tiepolo.

Largilli�re started his career in France with the particular variation of the idiom of the Netherlands which was current in England about 1680, and during the first twenty years after his transfer to Paris we find him adapting it to suit the taste of his country. In some portraits he applies the English convention directly, but in most cases he combines elements from it with other devices. For instance, in the portrait of a tutor and his pupil, the angular draperies of the pupil and the schematic drawing of his face belong to the English convention, whereas the head of the tutor is in a quite different vein of naturalism, suggesting rather a knowledge of Dutch painting. The pattern itself, with the two figures cut off at three-quarter-length, is a formula derived from Van Dyck and much favoured by his English followers. But the affectation of the boy’s pose and the unexpected placing of the dog in the foreground, facing into the composition, distinguish the painting from English models.

This painting is an outstanding example of French portraiture from the last quarter of the seventeenth century. The artist signed and dated it very clearly to 1685 on the stone pedestal in the lower right section of the composition.

The theme of a tutor and his ward was employed by another, somewhat earlier painter. Largilli�re’s composition has precedents, albeit generic ones, in double portraits by Anthony van Dyck, William Dobson, and Peter Lely, all of whom had significant portrait practices in England, where Largilli�re trained in his youth.