Portrait Of Françoise-marguerite De Sévigné, C.1670, Circle Of Pierre Mignard (1612-1695)

The sitter in this exquisite portrait is Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné, Comtesse de Grignan (1646-1705) who was a French aristocrat and largely remembered for the letters that her mother, Madame de Sévigné wrote to her over the span of nearly 30 years. The correspondence comprised of well over 1,000 letters and was often written at the rate of 20 pages a day. Madame de Sévigné is revered in France as one of the great icons of French literature. The overall treatment is sophisticated and demonstrative of a hand with considerable mastery of the oil technique. This striking example is a vibrant yet functional aristocrat image of the last quarter of the 17th century. Mignard enjoyed a pleasant monopoly of painting courtly and aristocratic ladies comprising a distinguishable style of ideal beauty at the time. The Mignard Madonna’s were so completely the rage that any lady worth her salt wanted her portrait in this style. Woman smiled “Mignardement” and wanted “Mignardse” of expression; the word essentially became part of the French language and was used with great frequency. Françoise-Marguerite was born in Paris and was the first child of Henri de Sévigné and his young wife, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal. Her mother became well established in the royal court of Louis XIV and 17-year-old Françoise-Marguerite made her court debut in the Royal Ballets des Arts, dancing a lead role alongside Louis himself. She was a sensation and was referred to as “A dazzling young beauty” and “a beauty to set the world afire”. In 1665, she danced again with the King in a ballet entitled The Birth of Venus and at a supper in 1668 both Madame de Sévigné and her daughter were seated at the King’s table. As the King was at that time between love affairs, it was widely speculated that Françoise-Marguerite would be his next mistress. The “honor” of royal mistress, however was to fall upon the Madame de Montespan. Francois Marguerite eventually married François Adhémar de Monteil, comte de Grignan and that same year Louis XIV named Monsieur de Grignan the lieutenant general of the King in Provence and he was such obliged to leave Paris and return to his family castle in the south of France. The separation of Françoise-Marguerite and her mother left Madame de Sévigné bereft. "I look in vain for my daughter; I no longer see her, and every step she takes increases the distance between us. (I am) still weeping, still swooning with grief," she wrote to Françoise-Marguerite only hours after her departure - thus began perhaps the most famous series of correspondence in literary history. The artist has modelled their subject with a slight turn of the head creating a sense of intimacy and elegance and the Francoise Marguerite is sumptuously dressed in a white gown with collarette and an azure silk mantle. France during this period was the leading exponent of fashion and the arts to the rest of Europe. This portrait can be quite accurately dated from the attire and hairstyle, which was known as the hurlupe or hurluberlu (tousseled or "mixed up"). The style appeared around 1670 and was a radical new hairstyle at Versailles. The fashionistas of the day decided to abandon the traditional coiffe and to be styled only with their own hair, much shorter than before, and worn in dense curls clustered over the ears, and sometimes with longer curls hanging down from them. Madame de Sevigne, Marquise de Sevigne, wrote to her daughter in the countryside on the 18th of March that year and thought at first that the women looked "completely naked" and that the King at first seeing the hairstyle had "doubled over with laughter". She wrote “I was greatly amused at the head-dresses” and “…felt inclined to give a slap to them”. The hairstyle became an overnight sensation and according to Madame de Sevigne "people are talking of nothing else". Madame de Sevigne goes on to write the lengths to which the women went to achieve the look and that they slept "with a hundred rollers, which make them endure mortal agony all night long". But such disparaging remarks didn't stop most of the fashionable ladies from trying the radical hairstyle. Even Madame de Sevigne eventually got used to the sight and was in fact "completely won over" and even wrote to her daughter that the style is "perfectly suited to your face" telling her that she'll send her a fashion doll just so she can get it right. Later she wrote a lengthy description of Madame de Montesspan, the King's mistress at a grand reception at Versailles "with no head covering and styled with a thousand curls" and thought her a "triumphant beauty to turn all the ambassador’s heads". There are at least two other versions of this composition – both almost identical and with the sitter’s right arm bent at the elbow and the hand clutching the wrap (one in the Glauco Lombardi Museum, Parma). There is also a known portrait by Mignard of this sitter painted c.1669 in the Musée Carnavalet, Paris. The present work is a beautiful item and particularly well-preserved having undergone a sensitive cleaning process to reveal the rich colour and expressive brushwork of the artist. Presented in a circa 1700 carved and gesso frame. Pierre Mignard, known as le Romain, was a French painter of the court of the French King Louis XIV and was, with Charles Le Brun (1619-90), one of the most successful painters during the reign of Louis XIV. After training in Troyes, where he was born, and in Bourges, Mignard joined the studio of Simon Vouet in Paris in 1627. He went to Italy in 1636 and remained there until 1657. He studied the work of Correggio and Pietro da Cortona in Rome as well as copying Annibale Carracci's frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese. Because of his rivalry with Le Brun, Mignard was unwilling to become a member of the Academy, but on Le Brun's death in 1690 he succeeded him as its Director and as First Painter to the King painting no less than 10 portraits of the king. Provenance: Private collection, Suffolk, England Measurements: Height 97cm, Width 85cm framed (Height 38”, Width 33.5” framed)