Louis Tocqué, 'Portrait of a Man', 1747

Tocqué was one of the most sought-after Parisian portraitists in the late eighteenth century, especially for male sitters, and his work was compared by his contemporaries to that of Anthony Van Dyck.

We do not know the identity of the jovial-looking man in this half-length portrait. He rests one hand on the back of a chair and the other on his hip as he turns to observe us with a smile. He wears a particularly beautiful gold brocade waistcoat beneath his blue-grey velvet jacket, the button holes of which are stitched in gold. The elaborate waistcoat is a visual sign of the sitter’s social status and has been left mainly unbuttoned to show off his magnificent lace jabot. He may not have actually owned the waistcoat, however, as it also appears in Tocqué’s Portrait of Jean-Baptiste-Joachim Colbert, marquis de Croissy, of 1749 (now in the The Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame, Indiana) and his Portrait of Charles-David Godefroy, seigneur de Senneville (sold Sotheby’s, New York, 30 January 1998). Like the sitters in those portraits, the gentleman here may have been a wealthy aristocrat, or he could equally well have been a financier. His luxurious painting – larger than the standard head and shoulders of Croissy and Senneville – must have been more expensive as it includes the sitter’s hands and a column at the right and a curtain at the left. Tocqué has emphasised the refinement of the fabrics with typically subtle brushstrokes, rendering the reflections of light on the lace, waistcoat and curtain braid.

Tocqué wrote that it is the manner of bearing which gives an air of nobility rather than the richness of the costume. In his bearing, our sitter displays an aristocratically relaxed attitude, which recalls Van Dyck as much as Rigaud. Tocqué captures his psychology as well as his appearance. It was the artist’s belief that the hands also played an important part in the rendering of the character and social status of a sitter. Rolling up the cuffs, he explained, uncovers the wrists, whose delicacy plays a part in the sitter’s elegance. He admitted that, because of the scarcity of beautiful hands, it was worth an artist building up a repertoire of fine examples, or even copying old master paintings (especially Van Dyck). Consequently it is not possible to tell if the hands in our portrait are really those of the man portrayed.

The portrait is signed and dated 1747, which was a key year in Tocqué’s private life: on 7 February 1747 he married the eldest daughter of his master Jean-Marc Nattier. The two artists formed a partnership that allowed them to fulfil portrait commissions for couples. During 1747 they were mainly occupied with painting portraits of the Dauphin Louis, the Dauphine Marie-Thérèse and three of the daughters of Louis XV.