An Infanta of Spain

This undated portrait of an Infanta of Spain at the Bowes Museum in County Durham represents Largillière's engagement with the Spanish royal family or their diplomatic connections in France. Spanish Infantas were the daughters of the Spanish Habsburgs, and their portraiture carried enormous political weight in the dynastic marriage diplomacy of the period. The most famous connection between French and Spanish royal portraiture in this era was the negotiation of the marriage between Louis XV and a Spanish Infanta—eventually cancelled—and the period 1717-1725 was particularly charged with such connections. The Bowes Museum holds an important collection of French decorative art and painting reflecting the Bowes family's profound engagement with French culture in the nineteenth century. Largillière's portrait of a Spanish princess, whether actual or in the guise of a French sitter imagined as Spanish, demonstrates his capacity for the most elevated of dynastic portraiture.

Spanish royal portraiture had its own conventions—deeply influenced by Velázquez—of formal rigidity, rich dark costumes, and the specific staging of royal childhood. Largillière would have worked either from a Spanish court portrait as reference or directly from a sitter, adapting his characteristic warmth of palette to the cooler, more restrained Spanish conventions.