Portrait of Marguerite de Sève, Wife of Barthélemy-Jean-Claude Pupil

Artist: Nicolas de Largillière
Title: Portrait of Marguerite de Sève, Wife of Barthélemy-Jean-Claude Pupil
Date: 1729
Culture: French
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 38.4 x 106.4 cm (54-1/2 x 41-7/8 in.)
Accession Number: 1971:001.A
Credit Line: Nicolas de Largillière, Portrait of Marguerite de Sève, Wife of Barthélemy-Jean-Claude Pupil, 1729, oil on canvas, 138.4 x 106.4 cm (54-1/2 x 41-7/8 in.), Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art

Description

Nicolas de Largillière, who enjoyed a long and successful career as a portraitist, was sought out early in the eighteenth century by important new clients from the provinces of France. One of them was Barthélemy-Jean-Claude Pupil, who received two judicial appointments in Lyon after his marriage in 1722 to Marguerite de Sève, the subject of the portrait. His wife wears a costume with an embossed and jeweled bodice that looks made of metal but may be silk mounted on molded buckram, a stiff material. The music she touches with her left hand and the words underneath it are for a drinking song of the kind that sophisticated women sang at an evening gathering at home.

Related Information / Media

Provenance:

By a series of indirect inheritances to Comte Olivier de la Ferrière, his sale, 1969; Acquired by the Putnam Foundation, 1971 [1]

Provenance Notes:

[1] Inscribed on the lining of the canvas on the reverse, evidently copying an inscription on the back of the original canvas, is the following legend: peint par / N. de Largillière. / .1729

Exhibited:

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,:1981, Largillière and the Eighteenth Century, cat. by Myra Nan Rosenfeld, p. 245, figs. III, IV.

Literature:

Marie-Félicie Perez, "Collectionneurs et amateurs d'artt à Lyon au XVIIIe siècle," Revue de l'Art, no. 47 (1980): 44, 45,51 n.19, figs.1, 2; Jean-Luc Bordeaux, "Baroque to Neo-Classicism," Apollo 1I5 (June 1.982): 450, figs. 1.2, :13; Timken Art Gallery: European and American Works of Art in the Putnam Foundation Collection (San Diego, 1983), pp. 52-55, 120, nos. 17,18, ills.

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Note

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