Portrait de Marie Leszczynska, reine de France

The Musée Cognacq-Jay's 1751 portrait of Queen Marie Leszczyńska is one of several images Nattier made of Louis XV's consort over the decades of his court career. By 1751 Marie Leszczyńska had been queen for twenty-six years, bearing ten children and weathering the king's notorious infidelities with public dignity and private piety. She was fifty-three at the time this portrait was painted, and Nattier's approach balances the requirements of royal imagery—crown, ermine, the formal attributes of majesty—with a degree of personal character that prevents the work from collapsing into pure ceremonial formula. The queen was known as a devoted patron of the arts and a woman of genuine religious faith, and these qualities inform the particular gravity Nattier brings to her depiction. The Cognacq-Jay, assembled by the founders of La Samaritaine department store as a private expression of French cultural pride, is an ideal institutional home for such a work.

Royal portraiture at this scale required Nattier's finest finish. The ermine mantle with its precisely painted black spots, the jewel-studded crown, and the queen's face—requiring both respect and honesty about her age—demonstrate the full range of his technical mastery.