Oval Old School French Seventeenth / Eighteenth Centuries

Oval extremely refined with generous dimensions, the portrait period is between the late seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Master of the French school of Hyacinthe Rigaud. Portrait of a gentleman, oil on canvas, contemporary old frame of painting. Table typical of the time representing a man in the foreground, seen three quarters. The man wears an impressive "leonine" wig, very fashionable at this time, while the fabrics of the clothes are also rich and elegant, with a background in warm tones behind the man. The models in use at the time are always represented with busts up to the elbow, turned to the right of the composition, the head almost opposite. A heavy and refined velvet coat covers all the shoulders. This way of describing the characters should suggest the intelligence of the person represented. It was necessary to avoid carefully that the head was turned to the side where the body was bent, at the risk that the work translated our inability to look almost at the back. The model thus imagined proved to have spirit and elegance emphasizing its social status. This method was widely used in the early 1700s in France and allowed to index the price of works in relation to the cost of raw materials (canvas, colors). There was a kind of tariff to regulate the price of paints according to their size and their clothes, the representation of hands requiring a significant increase in the cost of painting. This scale is very useful shows the evolution of prices down, formats can be relatively small (about 70 x 59 cm in vogue between 1680 and 1690, to pass, around 1700-1705, format "81 x 65 cm") . To finally arrive at generous formats and much more expensive as the table we presented (120 x 100 cm). Our reference code. D 172