Nicolas De Largillierre Or Largillière (1656-1746) Workshop. Portrait Of A Lady Of Quality.

Nicolas de Largillierre or Largillière (1656-1746) workshop. Portrait of a lady of quality.

Oil on canvas, 65 cm by 53 cm.
Antique frame, 85 cm by 70 cm.

Provenance: Wildenstein collection.

Often spelled Largillière, it should actually be written Largillierre.
In a very beautiful carved wooden frame, the artist offers us this beautiful portrait of a lady of quality. She is seated on a Louis XIV style armchair with richly carved armrests. Her right arm rests on a piece of furniture on which stands a very beautiful vase.

Nicolas de Largillierre (1656-1746)

Born in Paris to a hatter father, Largillierre spent his youth in Antwerp, where he was a pupil of Antoine Goubau and where he was received as a master of the guild in 1672. Shortly after, he went to England, where he was protected by Peter Lely who employed him in his workshop. This dual training as a genre painter and portraitist would be found throughout his career. Poorly regarded 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), where his principal qualities already shone forth: capable of orchestrating in a flattering and solemn manner a portrait in which he had enclosed in symbolic shortcuts the entire career of his model, he at the same time held attention with his brilliant execution and the vigor of his psychological analysis. Most of his career was devoted to portraiture, but he was also commissioned to commemorate various events in the life of Paris. He was then able to rejuvenate the tradition of Dutch group portraits (City Council deliberating... in 1687, lost; sketches in the Louvre and the Hermitage) or to associate Parisian aldermen with a celestial apparition (Ex-voto to Saint Genevieve, 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 color 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 body of work spread over some sixty years, without it being easy to distinguish its evolution. His clientele, a little less aristocratic than that of his friend Rigaud, was mainly recruited from parliamentarians, financiers and other wealthy bourgeoisie.