Portrait of a Magistrate, French School of the 17th century attributed to Robert le Vrac de Tournières

Robert le Vrac de Tournières (attributed to)
Born June 17, 1667 in Ifs – May 18, 1752 in Caen
“Portrait of a Magistrate”
French School of the 17th century
Oil on canvas, 65 cm x 54 cm
Carved wooden frame, gilded with gold.

A student of Lucas Delahaye, then of Bon Boullogne and Hyacinthe Rigaud, Tournières was admitted twice to the Royal Academy of Painting, in 1702, as a portrait painter with the portraits of the painters Pierre Mosnier and Michel Corneille, and on October 24, 1716 , as a history painter with The Invention of Drawing (1716), showing "Dibutade painting on the wall the shadow of his lover in the lighting of a candle”, which made him nicknamed “the Schalken of France”.
With real talent as a physiognomist and painter, Tournières enjoyed a very great reputation during his lifetime. Highly sought after in his time, he was the portraitist of the Regent, chancellors and many political figures and left more than two hundred portraits, most of them kept in private collections. His numerous portraits representing characters from various classes: ministers, magistrates, ladies of the court, artists, merchants. With a delicate color, a perfect suitability in the installation and adjustment, a certain elegance in the draperies, he is an artist more careful than powerful. He gave the French portrait formula a particular truth and vigor and his “genre” work is one of the most significant of the Dutch influence on French art.

The heterogeneous character of his work is typical of an artist of the transitional period of the Regency: the lightness of his palette prefigures the Rococo style, while the Dutch elements give his work a new and more intimate character, which contributes to renew the Rigaud school of portraiture which had brought a somewhat superficial pomp to French art. He executed large paintings, the memory and trace of which are lost, and small ones in which he stood out, influenced by Godfried Schalken and Gérard Dou whom he had specially studied. He saw particular decorations and lighting in Dutch paintings, and imbued himself with their realistic atmosphere, the serious simplicity of their portraits to retain the modeling of the faces, the deep and discreet expression of interior life and restore them on his paintings.
Among his most remarkable paintings, we cite a portrait of Maupertuis, engraved by Daullé; another by Pécour, engraved by Chéreau; that of Academician Mosnier, at the School of Fine Arts; that of Michel Corneille, in Versailles. Other of his works belong to the funds of the museums of Orléans and Rennes, to the museum and library of Caen, and to the museum of Nantes.
His main students were Huliot fils, flower painter, Romagnesi and Lemoyne. Sarrabat and Daulle each engraved a portrait painted by Tournières.