Louis XV

Van Loo's Louis XV in the Wallace Collection, dated 1766, depicts the king in his fifty-sixth year, toward the end of his reign before his death in 1774. By 1766 Louis's reputation had recovered somewhat from the humiliations of the Seven Years War (1756-63) but his political authority had been significantly constrained by the parlements and public opinion had turned increasingly critical. Van Loo was no longer in royal employment but had maintained connections to the court through his extensive society portrait practice, and a portrait of the king at this date might represent a private or semi-official commission rather than the grand state portraits of his earlier career. The Wallace Collection, assembled by the Marquesses of Hertford in the nineteenth century as a personal collection of French art and decorative objects, is particularly rich in French court painting of the eighteenth century, and this work sits within a collection that comprehensively documents Rococo culture at its height.

A late portrait of Louis XV by van Loo would reflect both the aging of the sitter and the evolution of van Loo's own style in the decade since his return from Spain. His technique by the 1760s incorporated some of the greater sobriety of emerging Neoclassical taste without abandoning the tonal warmth and textural richness of his formation. The aging king's face would have required van Loo to balance truthful representation with the dignity appropriate to royal portraiture.