Hyacinthe Rigaud

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Hyacinthe Rigaud
Self-portrait in a turban, 1698, Perpignan, Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud.
Birth name	Rigau
Born	18 July 1659 Perpignan
Died	29 December 1743 Paris
Nationality	French
Field	painting, portraiture
Training	Charles Le Brun Paul Pezet (presumed) Antoine Ranc (presumed)
Movement	Baroque
Works	coronation portrait of Louis XIV ; The Presentation in the temple ; portrait of Bossuet in winter costume ; portraits of Louis XIV
Influenced by	Antony Van Dyck Rubens Rembrandt
Influenced	Jean Ranc Nicolas Desportes Charles Sévin de La Pennaye, Louis René Vialy, Joseph André Cellony
Awards	Prix de Rome 1682

Louis XIV
King of France and Navarre
by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1701), his most famous work.

"Gaspard de Gueidan playing the musette" (Gaspard de Gueidan en joueur de musette, 1738), Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence.

Hyacinthe Rigaud (18 July 1659, Perpignan (Pyrénées-Orientales)–29 December 1743, Paris) was a French baroque painter of Catalan origin whose career was based in Paris.

He is renowned for his portrait paintings of Louis XIV, the royalty and nobility of Europe, and members of their courts and considered one of the most notable French portraitists of the classical period. For Jacques Thuillier, professor at the Collège de France :

He was the most important portrait painter during the reign of King Louis XIV. His instinct for impressive poses and grand presentations precisely suited the tastes of the royal personages, ambassadors, clerics, courtiers, and financiers who sat for him. Rigaud owes his celebrity to the faithful support he received from the four generations of Bourbons whose portraits he painted. He garnered the core of his clientele among the richest circles as well as among the bourgeois, financiers, nobles, industrialists and government ministers. His œuvre reads as a near-complete portrait gallery of the chief movers in France from 1680 to 1740. Some of that œuvre (albeit a minority) also includes those of more humble origins - Rigaud's friends, fellow artists or simple businessmen.

Inseparable from this portrait of Louis XIV in his coronation costume^[2], Rigaud courted all the major ambassadors of his time and several European monarchs. The exact number of paintings he produced remains in dispute, since he left a highly detailed catalogue but also more than a thousand different models which specialists agree he used^[3]. To these may be added the large number of copies in Rigaud's book of accounts, without even mentioning the hundreds of other paintings rediscovered since the accounts' publication in 1919.

The grandson of painter-gilders from Roussillon, Rigaud was trained in tailoring in his father's workshop and perfected his skills under Antoine Ranc at Montpellier from 1671 onwards, before moving to Lyon four years later. It was in these cities that he became familiar with Flemish, Dutch and Italian painting, particularly that of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Titian, whose works he later collected. Arriving in Paris in 1681, he won the prix de Rome in 1682, but on the advice of Charles Le Brun did not make the trip to Rome to which this entitled him. Received into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1700, he rose to the top of this institution before retiring from it in 1735.

According to the French art historian Louis Hourticq,

True "photographs"^[5], faces that Diderot called "letters of recommendation written in the common language of all men^[6]", Rigaud's works today populate the world's major museums .

Biography

Perpignan

Rigaud was born Jacint Rigau i Ros^[7] -- though in many encyclopaedias is "re-christened" with the name of Híacint Francesc Honrat Mathias Pere Martyr Andreu Joan Rigau^[8] -- in Perpignan, which became part of France by the Treaty of the Pyrenees (7 November 1659) shortly after his birth. His younger brother Gaspard also became a painter.

Context and rise

First training

Training in Languedoc

Journey to Lyon

Beginnings

Arrival in Paris

In 1682, he was awarded the Prix de Rome.

First commissions

Return to Perpignan

Honours

In 1709, he was made a noble by his hometown of Perpignan. In 1727 he was made a knight of the Order of Saint Michael.

Naturalisation

Salon of 1704

Clientèle

Artists

Rigaud and the court

The Louis XV triptych

The European royal houses

Studio

Collaborators

Personal life

Marriages

Descendents

Fortune

"The French Van Dyck"

Posthumous reputation

Rigaud died in Paris in 1743 at the age of 84.

Because Rigaud's paintings captured very exact likenesses along with the subject's costumes and background details, his paintings are considered precise records of contemporary fashions. Rigaud was a master of the Baroque style of art. Rigaud's best-known work is his 1701 painting of Louis XIV which today hangs in the Louvre in Paris, as well as the second copy also requested by Louis XIV that now hangs at the Palace of Versailles.^[9]

In 1820, the Musée des beaux-arts Hyacinthe Rigaud in Perpignan, France, was dedicated to him. It is still open to the public and shows some of his work.^[10]

Selected works

• Portrait of Graf Philipp Ludwig Wenzel Sinzendorf, 1712, oil on canvas, 166 x 132 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
• Portrait of Philippe de Courcillon, Marquis de Dangeau, 1702, oil on canvas, 162 x 150 cm, Musée national du château de Versailles et des Trianons, Versailles
• Portrait of Louis XIV, 1701, oil on canvas, 279 x 190 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
• ditto, oil on canvas, 238 x 149 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid
• ditto, oil on canvas, 1694 (full shot portrait), Musée du Louvre, Paris
• ditto, oil on canvas, 1715 (full shot portrait, "State Portrait"), Musée national du château de Versailles et des Trianons, Versailles
• Portrait of the artist's mother, 1695, oil on canvas, 83 x 103 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
• Portrait of Everhard Jabach, 1688, oil on canvas, 58,5 x 47 cm, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
• Studies Of Spaniels And Whippets, And A Study Of A White Headdress, oil on canvas
• Portrait of a Scholar, oil on canvas, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia
• Portrait of Pierre Imbert Drevet, c. 1700, oil on canvas, 116 x 89 cm, Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon, France
• Portrait of Louis XV of France at the age 5, wearing the Coronation Robes, 1715, oil on canvas, Musée national du château de Versailles et des Trianons, Versailles
• Portrait of Elizabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, c. 1719, oil on canvas, Musée national du château de Versailles et des Trianons, Versailles
• Portrait of La comtesse de Selles Marguerite-Henriette de Labriffe , 1712, oil on canvas
• Portrait of Charles Auguste d'Allonville de Louville, Marquis de Louville, 1708, oil on canvas, private collection
• Portrait of Frederick IV of Denmark, Nationalhistoriske Museum, Frederiksborg Palace, Denmark
• Portrait of Sebastien Bourdon, drawing, 1731, 36,1 × 24,9 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main
• Portrait of Louis Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis d'Antin, c. 1710
• Portrait of Augustus II the Strong, oil on canvas, 1715, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
• Portrait of Martin van der Bogaert, drawing, c. 1700, 37,4 × 28,7 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main
• Portrait of a young scholar, drawing, 1685, 31,4 × 25,5 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main
• Portrait of Cardinal Henri Oswald de La Tour d'Auvergne, 1732, oil on canvas, 142 × 113 cm, private collection.
• Portrait of Nicolas Le Camus, drawing, c. 1701, 38,4 × 29,4 cm, Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt am Main

References

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