Portrait of a Military Officer

Portrait of a Military Officer

Portrait of a Military Officer
Artist:Hyacinthe Rigaud (French, Perpignan 1659–1743 Paris)
Date:ca. 1710
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:54 x 41 3/8 in. (137.2 x 105.1 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund, 1959
Accession Number:59.119
This portrait is based on a prototype by Rigaud showing the comte d'Évreux as a young man that was painted in about 1703.
Catalogue Entry
The composition was used by Rigaud for a portrait of the fourth son of the duc de Bouillon, Henri Louis de la Tour d’Auvergne, comte d’Évreux. It is probably to be identified with a painting belonging to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel, which must date to 1703 and was exhibited at the 1704 Salon. The cavalry skirmish in the background has been attributed to Joseph Parrocel (1646–1704). The Kassel painting was much copied. There is an engraving in reverse made by Georg Friedrich Schmidt (1712–1775) in 1739 which differs in some details and may have been based on a second version of the Kassel picture. The comte d’Évreux belonged to a noble family from the south of France and received the baton of maréchal de camp in 1704. A great-nephew of Cardinal Mazarin, he married into the wealthy Crozat family in 1707 and was the builder of the Élysée palace.
The present portrait had been identified as a considerably later autograph work by Rigaud representing the comte d’Évreux and a date of about 1720 was proposed. A second version, discovered by Stéphan Perreau in 2004, was published as autograph and with the same date. More recently, however, he and Ariane James-Sarazin have suggested that our sitter may be misidentified. Our sitter’s jowl is thicker and he has a wider forehead. There are slight differences in the armor and the skirmish is not enveloped in a cloud of dust. In Schmidt’s engraving, the arrangement of the cavalry figures, the ends of the sash, and several details of the armor are closer to our painting than the one in Kassel.
Katharine Baetjer 2012

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