Offered by Franck Baptiste Paris
The young sovereign is represented in a three-quarter bust at the age of twenty-seven.
He is richly dressed in a white doublet embroidered with gold thread, the sleeves of which are slashed and reveal a luminous red silk.
His precious garment is barred with the cord of the Order of the Holy Spirit and the "little goose" which is an apron of ribbon knots at waist height.
The collar of his doublet is decorated with a ruff called "à la confusion" which is the ancestor of the large starched ruffs of the Renaissance, but in a smaller and more flexible version.
The king wears a thin moustache and a "à la comète" hairstyle with long hair that is brought back to the side and falls in a long lock on his left shoulder.
Her face with fine features is immersed in a soft, oblique artificial light, probably from a candle, which has the effect of illuminating and softening the complexions of her skin.
Oil on canvas, dated "1628", top right.
Very well preserved.
Antique frame in gilded wood with leaf.
French work attributable to the painter Daniel Dumonstier (1574-1646)
Dimensions:
Frame: Height: 101 cm; Width: 84 cm
Canvas: Height: 85 cm; Width: 68 cm
Related works:
-Portrait of Louis XIII, pencil on paper, Condé Museum at the Château de Chantilly (INV No. PD 383)
-Portrait of Louis XIII, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts of Chambéry. (INV No. M863)
-Portrait of Henry II de Montmorency, oil on canvas, Musée Carnavalet (INV No. P 1456)
-Portrait of Gaston d’Orleans, Château de Blois.
Our opinion:
The rare portrait that we are presenting dates from the year 1628, five years before the sumptuary edicts of 1633 which prohibited the wearing of any luxury clothing.
The young sovereign therefore appears in all his splendor, dressed in his finest assets.
If at first glance the work refers us to his favorite portraitist Frans Pourbus the Younger (1570-1622), the latter was already dead in 1628.
His friend Rubens also produced a royal portrait with a similar pose but his touch is completely different from our work which is rather to be compared with the portrait kept at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Chambéry.
In this portrait, as in our painting, the light that illuminates the king's face takes a very important place and denotes a perfect knowledge of the chiaroscuro technique made famous a few decades earlier by Caravaggio.
We find this same light and an identical doublet on the portrait of Henry II de Montmorency kept at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris which is today attributed to the famous French painter and draftsman Daniel Dumonstier.
It is very likely that our man was chosen to follow in Pourbus' footsteps; the rare portraits of the king datable to the 1630s take up the pose of a Flemish painter but present a slightly different and very French touch in the rendering of the face, which is characteristic of his technique.
The artist who is one of the best draftsmen of his generation was already in the service of the royal family in the years 1600-1620 and then he will be in the service of the king for whom he produced a pencil portrait on May 22, 1622.
This first drawing, made only a month after Pourbus' death, certainly confirms his advent as the new portraitist of the king.
In this drawing preserved at the Condé Museum in Chantilly, Dumonstier uses the same pose, the same hairstyle and the same ruff with jagged contours.
Our work, which is very powerful due to its strong contrast and its rich chromatic palette, is an original whose existence we did not know until today.
It is part of an extremely limited corpus of portraits attributable to Dumonstier, two of which represent King Louis XIII.
Daniel Dumonstier (1574-1646)
Daniel Dumonstier1, born on May 14, 1574 and died on June 22, 1646, is a French draftsman and painter nicknamed in his time "the most excellent penciler in Europe". He made portraits of a large number of figures from the first half of the 17th century, particularly from the royal family.
He was the son of Cosme Dumonstier, painter, valet of the king, and Charlotte Bernier.
His fame was due to his quality as a portrait designer with three pencils, but also to his personality. He was skeptical about religion and libertine in his way of thinking and behaving. His personality allowed him to approach the greatest figures of the kingdom, but also by Peiresc and by Malherbe. His character made him the only artist to whom Tallemant des Réaux dedicated one of his stories, published under the title Du Moustier.
His cabinet of curiosities was one of the most famous in Paris. Several famous visitors came to see it, such as the Duke of Buckingham, in 1625, Cardinal Pamphili, nephew of Innocent X.His library was renowned. Coveted by Gabriel Naudé, Mazarin's librarian, it was acquired by him after his death in 1646.
