Guillaume de Lamoignon, First President of the Parlement of Paris
François Girardon (1628-1715) · 1671-1673
Guillaume de Lamoignon, the highest magistrate in France, looks out from beneath a heavy wig with the gravity of his office. Girardon gives him the robes and the bands of a president of the Parlement, but the face is lively and particular, with a hint of a smile. Beneath the bust, a long Latin inscription on the pedestal explains why it was made: the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture dedicated the portrait to his son Nicolas in the year 1671, in gratitude for Lamoignon's brilliant defence of the privileges of the arts before the Parlement.
The Academy commissioned the bust in 1671 from Girardon, sculptor of Louis the Fourteenth's Apollo group at Versailles, and showed it at the Salon of 1673. It then went to the château de Courson, south of Paris, where the family kept it for generations, and it was still recorded there in the second half of the nineteenth century. Rediscovered in a private collection in the early nineteen nineties, it was declared a national treasure in 2017 and purchased by the Louvre in 2019, making it one of the most recent arrivals in these rooms.
Did You Know? The bust spent more than three centuries in private hands before the Louvre acquired it in 2019 as a national treasure.
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