Drouais portrait de madame de pompadour biography
Madame de pompadour ink box...
The son of a painter, Hubert Drouais, François-Hubert became a successful portraitist at the French court.
Drouais portrait de madame de pompadour biography
He was especially fashionable for his likenesses of aristocratic children dressed as gardeners or Savoyard beggars to emphasise their 'natural' or 'filial' characters (little Savoyard hurdy-gurdy players brought their earnings back every year to their mothers in the Haute Savoie).
This sumptuous portrait of Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, similarly employs the imagery of bourgeois virtue and industry to flatter a great lady.
In this case, however, the fiction is less pronounced: the Marquise de Pompadour had been born plain Mademoiselle Poisson.
Pretty, charming, good-natured and well-educated, at the age of nine she had been told by a fortune-teller that she would reign over the heart of a king - after which her family called her Reinette, 'little Queen' (twenty years later she was to reward the woman with the gift of an enormous sum, six hundred livres).
Married