Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles (Jul 2023)
La genèse d’une galerie de portraits historiques : l’exemple de la série des amiraux de France
Abstract
This article is about the series of French admirals, a set of sixty-one portraits that are now almost entirely preserved in the Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon. Commissioned in the 1720s by the Count of Toulouse to decorate one of the rooms in his Parisian mansion, these portraits eventually joined, through inheritance, the collections of Louis-Philippe’s Versailles museum, where they found their place in the portrait galleries dedicated to the great military figures of French history. After briefly tracing their history, this article focuses on identifying the historical and iconographic sources used for these portraits in order to understand how they were executed and to identify the main actors and artists who contributed to the creation of the series. The proposed analysis of this singular ensemble allows us to understand more concretely the series of retrospective portraits and the way they were conceived at the beginning of the eighteenth century. These figures of admirals, halfway between historical document, work of art and aristocratic entertainment, allow us to broaden our knowledge of the working methods and sources used by the painters of this minor genre of historical portraits in the modern period.
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