Lot 416: Jean Raoux Montpellier 1677 - 1734 Paris , Portrait Historié of a seated lady scarcely clad and in the guise of a nymph near a source, in a wooded landscape with two huntresses in the background oil on canvas

signed and dated lower right: I. Raoux. F./ 1729 oil on canvas

203.5 by 152.5 cm.

By tradition, the painting has never left the collection of the present owner's family.

Being received as a full member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1717, on the same day as Antoine Watteau, Raoux was one of the most influential portrait painters of the first quarter of the 18th Century. Although he is best known for having developed a new formula of bust-length representations of women in fancy dress featuring an almost Rembrandtesque lighting, Raoux's more conventional portraits foreshadow the work of Jean-Marc Nattier, France's most celebrated portraitist of the 18th Century.

This portrait of a hitherto unknown sitter is a prime example of the monumentality that some of Raoux large-scale portraits possess. Compare for example Raoux's portrait of the Marquise de Changey in the guise of a shepherdess, sold London, Sotheby's, 16 April, 1997, lot 200. It is in this and in the present work that the artist fully achieved to capture the contemporary taste for grandeur and classicizing flattery of sitters, who were mostly young women from the periphery of the Parisian court society.