Antique 18th Century French School Portrait

OIL ON CANVAS DIMENSIONS : 80 X 96 CM
HYACINTHE RIGAUD'S ATELIER

PORTRAIT OF CLAUDE LOUISE DE VILLARS
The painting is completed by a precious coeval frame, carved and gilded with gold leaf

Claude Louis Hector de Villars, prince de Martigues, marquis later duke of Villars, viscount of Melun (8 May 1653 – 17 June 1734) was a French military commander and a distinguished general of Louis XIV of France. He was one of only six Marshals to have been promoted to Marshal General of France.
Villars was born in Moulins (in the current department of Allier) into a noble but poor family, his father was the diplomat] Pierre de Villars.

He entered the French army through the page corps in 1671, He distinguished himself at the age of twenty in the siege of Maastricht in 1673 during the Franco-Dutch war and after the bloody battle of Seneffe a year later he was promoted to field mestre de camp (colonel) of a cavalry regiment.

Subsequent promotion would take time despite his long history of service under Turenne, the Grande Condé and Luxembourg, and his aristocratic birth, for he had incurred the enmity of the powerful Louvois. He was finally made a field marshal in 1687.

In the interval between the Dutch wars and the formation of the League of Augsburg, Villars, who combined his military skills with a diplomat's tact and subtlety, was employed on an unofficial mission to the Bavarian court, and became there's constant companion of Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria.

He returned to France in 1690 and was given command of the cavalry army in Flanders, but towards the end of the War of the Grand Alliance, in 1698, he went to Vienna as ambassador.

Villars played an important part in Regency politics as Cardinal Dubois's chief opponent, and only memories of the Montmorency rebellion prevented his being named constable of France. He took the field for the last time in the War of the Polish Succession (1734), with the title of marshal-general of the king's armies, which Turenne had held before him. But he was now more than eighty years old, and after opening the campaign energetically he died in Turin on 17 June 1734.

Hyacinthe Rigaud (Perpignan, July 20, 1659 - Paris, December 27, 1743)
was a French painter of Catalan origins.
He became particularly famous for having portrayed the Sun King in the famous Portrait of Louis XIV in his coronation clothes which earned him the appointment as painter of the French court in 1701, from which moment he began to paint portraits for most of the important personalities of Versailles.
He is considered one of the leading portrait painters of the Baroque period together with Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Titian.

According to Jacques Thuillier, professor at the College of France, "Hyacinthe Rigaud was one of those French painters who under the Ancien Régime were among the most celebrated portrait painters. This admiration was well deserved for the abundance of works and for the constant perfection that he imprinted on them".
With his work, Rigaud not only celebrated the splendor of the court of Versailles but also his loyalty to the Bourbon dynasty of France whose effigies he painted for four generations. He also worked for personalities of the aristocracy, clergy, bourgeois, financiers, nobles, industrialists and ministers, collaborating to create an almost complete gallery of portraits of the leading personalities of the kingdom of France between 1680 and 1740. A part of his pictorial production, albeit a minority, is made up of more discreet characters such as friends, relatives, other artists or simply traders.
THE WORK WILL BE SHIPPED IN A WOODEN CASE AND WILL BE ACCOMPANIED BY A CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY