Portrait de la Comtesse de Bemareau

Dated 1695 and held by the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, this portrait of the Comtesse de Bemareau belongs to Largillière's most technically accomplished period for female portraiture, when his command of the genre was at its fullest development. The Augustins museum holds important French and European painting in a building whose Gothic and Romanesque architecture creates an atmospheric setting quite different from its original museum context. A comtesse—French countess—represents the upper tier of Largillière's female clientele, and this work would have been among the more formally demanding of his female commissions, requiring the full array of aristocratic portrait conventions: sumptuous dress, formal bearing, rich background, and the delicate balance between flattery and likeness that made his portraits sought after across the social spectrum.

The 1695 female portrait shows Largillière at a technically crucial moment: his Flemish-influenced darker manner was evolving toward the warmer, more luminous approach that would characterise his eighteenth-century work. The face would show more careful individual modelling than his later, more economical treatments, and the fabrics more richly impastoed.