The Échevins of the City of Paris before St Geneviève

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.