Louis XIV se repose dans le sein de la gloire après la paix de Nimègue.

Painted in 1681, when Antoine Coypel was still a young man in his early twenties recently returned from Rome, this allegory celebrates the Peace of Nijmegen (1678–79), which concluded France's wars against the Dutch Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain. Louis XIV emerged from these treaties as the dominant ruler in Europe, and the French royal court commissioned numerous allegorical works to memorialise the triumph. The image of the king resting in the bosom of Glory — a female personification — belongs to the language of political allegory that French painters had perfected under Charles Le Brun. Coypel, though young, already showed the confident figure invention and warm Venetian-inflected palette that would define his mature career. Works from this moment in his output are comparatively rare and document the formation of a style that would dominate French court painting for the next three decades. Musée Fabre preserves the picture as a document of late seventeenth-century French political iconography.

Oil on canvas in a fully developed allegorical mode. Coypel orchestrates multiple personifications — Glory, Victory, Fame — around the central royal figure with the fluency of a trained history painter well beyond his years. The palette, warmer and more Rubensian than the cooler French classical tradition, suggests the direct influence of his Roman years. Cloud masses provide a heavenly staging platform common in French ceiling-to-easel allegorical work.