Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746) Portrait of a young woman of quality

I thank Monsieur Dominique Brême for having examined the work in person. The painting will be included in the next catalog raisonné that Mr. Brême, specialist in the artist and director of the museum of the Domaine départemental de Sceaux is in the process of composing.

Canvas re-lined 81.5 cm by 65.5 cm
Old frame 111 cm by 95 cm

Nicolas de Largillierre offers us a superb portrait of a young woman with a face full of freshness, richly dressed in lace, silk, magnificent brocades, jewels... but I prefer to let you examine the work and thus let you discover with pleasure all the details for yourself. Note that this work can be dated around 1730. Largillierre, in these post-Louis XIV years, abandoned bright and vivid colors for a softer palette which notably gave a more intimate side to his paintings. A large frame, quite exceptional, accompanies this portrait in a very beautiful way.

Nicolas de Largillierre (1656-1746)

Born in Paris to a hatter father, Largillière spent his youth in Antwerp, where he was a pupil of Antoine Goubau and where he was received as a master at the guild in 1672. Shortly after, he went in England, where he is protected by Peter Lely who employs him in his workshop. This dual training as a genre painter and portraitist will be found throughout his career. Badly seen as a Catholic, Largillierre 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) in which his main qualities already shine: capable of orchestrating in a flattering and solemn manner a portrait in which he enclosed in symbolic shortcuts the whole career of his model, he simultaneously commands attention by his brilliant execution and the vigor of his 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 délibérant... in 1687, lost; sketches in the Louvre and the Hermitage) or associate the Parisian aldermen with a celestial apparition (Ex-voto à Sainte Geneviève, 1696, Paris, church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont). He also executed rare history paintings (Moses saved from the waters, 1728, Louvre), a few landscapes (Louvre) and still lifes, largely treated in a very simple color 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 spread over 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.