The marquise de Belestat

The Marquise de Belestat, depicted by Nattier in 1755, is one of the last substantial portraits from his active career—he would die in 1766, and his output slowed considerably in the final decade. The Wallace Collection holds this work alongside other French Rococo masterpieces acquired by the Marquess of Hertford and his son, Sir Richard Wallace, in the nineteenth century when the Parisian art market was making such purchases relatively accessible to wealthy British collectors. The marquise is an otherwise obscure historical figure whose main claim to historical attention is this portrait, a common fate for the many hundreds of noble women Nattier depicted over his forty-year career. By 1755 the Rococo was beginning to give way to the stricter lines of the emerging Neoclassical taste, but Nattier continued to paint in his established manner with no apparent concession to changing fashion—his style was his identity.

Late Nattier (1755) retains the smooth finish and warm-cool balance of his mature work but may show a slight loosening in the broader passages, as was common among aging painters whose hands had lost some of their earlier precision. The face remains his most carefully executed element.