Nicolas De Largillière (1656-1746) And Workshop-portrait Of A Young Lady Of Quality Around 1700.

Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746) and workshop-Portrait of a young lady of Quality around 1700.

Canvas 92 cm by 66 cm Frame
110 cm by 84 cm

This superb portrait represents a young lady of quality richly dressed. She is wearing a blue velvet dress embroidered with gold thread with a white silk lining. At the waist a silk brocade belt embellished with embroidery then on the shoulders, a red velvet coat lined with a silk brocade.

Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746)

Born in Paris of a hat-maker father, Largillière spent his youth in Antwerp, where he was a pupil of Antoine Goubau and where he was received as master of the guild in 1672. Shortly after, he went to in England, where he is protected by Peter Lely, who employs him in his workshop. This dual training of genre painter and portrait painter will be found throughout his career. Frowned upon as a Catholic, Largillière returned to Paris in 1682, where he was protected by a solid Flemish colony, grouped around Van der Meulen. In 1686, he was received at the Academy with a large Portrait of Le Brun (Louvre) where his main qualities already emerge: capable of orchestrating in a flattering and solemn manner a portrait in which he locked up in symbolic shortcuts the entire career of his model, he at the same time commands attention by a brilliant execution and vigor of psychological analysis. Most of his career is devoted to portraiture, but he was also responsible for commemorating various events in the life of Paris. He then knew how to rejuvenate the tradition of Dutch group portraits (Corps de ville deliberateur ... in 1687, lost; sketches at the Louvre and the Hermitage) or associate the Parisian aldermen with a celestial apparition (Ex-voto to Saint Geneviève, 1696, Paris, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont church). He also painted rare history paintings (Moïse sauvé des eaux, 1728, Louvre), some landscapes (Louvre) and still lifes, largely treated in a very simple colored harmony, probably quite early in his career (Paris, Petit Palais ; museums of Amiens, Dunkirk and Grenoble). Portraitist, he is the author of an immense work (1500 numbers, according to his contemporaries), spread over about sixty years, without it being easy to distinguish its evolution. His clientele, a little less aristocratic than that of his friend Rigaud, was recruited mainly from parliamentarians, financiers and other big bourgeois.