Pierre Mignard, First Painter to the King
Martin Desjardins (1637-1694) · Before 1689
The painter Pierre Mignard turns his head with the confident air of a man at the top of his profession. Curling wig, loosely knotted cravat and a cloak thrown across the shoulder give the bust the swagger of the age of Louis the Fourteenth, while the face is observed closely: the heavy lids, the set mouth, the lines beside the nose. Mignard was the rival of Charles Le Brun and succeeded him as first painter to the king in 1690. The bust shows him shortly before that triumph, in his seventies but still very much in command.
Martin Desjardins, born Martin van den Bogaert in Breda, was one of the leading portrait sculptors of the reign, and this bust was long attributed instead to Antoine Coysevox. Desjardins gave it to Mignard's daughter, the Comtesse de Feuquières, keeping the right to use it during his lifetime, a gift confirmed in his will of 1695. She in turn presented it to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1726. Seized at the Revolution, it passed through the Museum of French Monuments before being inventoried at the Louvre in the early eighteen twenties.
Did You Know? The sitter's daughter kept the bust and later gave it to the Academy whose members her father had spent a career competing against.
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