Louise-Madeleine Bertin de Vaugien, comtesse de Montchal

Nicolas de Largillière painted this 1736 portrait of Louise-Madeleine Bertin de Vaugien, Comtesse de Montchal, in his ninth decade—a remarkable testament to his sustained productivity well into old age. Largillière had been the dominant French portraitist since the late seventeenth century, outlasting Hyacinthe Rigaud and continuing to attract aristocratic clientele into the 1730s. A countess of the Montchal family would have been a natural client for Largillière, whose practice centred on the French noblesse de robe and ancien régime aristocracy. The Horvitz Collection, a significant private gathering of French eighteenth-century works, holds this portrait as a prime example of Largillière's late style, where his characteristically rich colour and sumptuous fabrics are maintained alongside the increasingly delicate facial treatment of a painter working from memory and formula as much as direct observation. By the late 1730s Largillière was in his mid-eighties, and the sustained quality of his portraiture at this date is without parallel in French art.

Largillière's late portraits show a softening of his earlier sharp tonal contrasts, with faces rendered more uniformly and fabrics handled with slightly less variety of texture than in his prime works. His brush handling remained fluent and the compositional formula—three-quarter length, turned pose, rich background—was maintained, but the individual responsiveness of his strongest portraits is somewhat moderated by age and habitual practice.