Portrait of Fontenelle

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) was one of the most celebrated French intellectuals of the age — a writer, academician, and popularizer of science who lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred. Largillière's portrait from 1750, held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres, would have been painted when Fontenelle was in his early nineties, making it a remarkable document of extreme longevity matched with continued intellectual prominence. Fontenelle was a member of the Académie française and the Académie des sciences, and his salon presence remained celebrated into old age. Portraying such a figure was an assertion of cultural prestige for both painter and sitter: Largillière himself was nearly as aged, being in his late eighties by 1750. The portrait captures a France that was transitioning from the age of Louis XIV, which both men had witnessed from youth, to the dawn of the Enlightenment they had helped shape.

Oil on canvas representing one of the final works of Largillière's career, painted with a subject of equally advanced age. The challenge of depicting extreme old age with dignity while avoiding caricature required the painter's full skill. Expected palette of deep reds or academic black with concentrated modelling of the aged face.