Presumed portrait of Antoine Portail, workshop of Nicolas de Largillière

Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746) entourage. Presumed portrait of Antoine Portail, 1st president of the Chamber of Paris from 1724 to 1736

Lined canvas measuring 85 cm by 61 cm
Superb original frame measuring 99 cm by 82 cm

Antoine Portail (1674, 1736)

Only one portrait of Portal was known, a copy (of low quality) of a master painting (anonymous, perhaps our painting). Antoine Portal was a student of Charles Rollin. He was successively advisor, general advocate and mortar president, before becoming First President of the Parliament of Paris in 17241. The same year, he was elected a member of the French Academy. “His natural eloquence and his love for letters,” notes d’Alembert laconically, “were his academic titles. » He had rendered great services to Louis embezzlement. Later, he was one of the commissioners charged with working with the regent to resolve the difficulties that Law's bank had created.

Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746)

Born in Paris to a hatter father, Largillière spent his youth in Antwerp, where he was a student of Antoine Goubau and where he was made master of the gilde in 1672. Shortly after, he went in England, where he was protected by Peter Lely who employed him in his workshop. This dual training as a genre painter and portraitist will be found throughout his career. Poorly regarded 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) in which his main qualities already shine through: capable of orchestrating in a flattering and solemn manner a portrait in which he enclosed in symbolic abbreviations the entire career of his model, he attracts attention at the same time by a brilliant execution and the vigor of the 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 deliberant... in 1687, lost; sketches in the Louvre and the Hermitage) or associate Parisian aldermen with a celestial apparition (Ex-voto to Saint Geneviève, 1696, Paris, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont church). He also executed rare history paintings (Moses saved from the waters, 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). A 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, is mainly recruited from parliamentarians, financiers and other upper bourgeoisie.