After Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743)
Portrait of Marc de Beauvau-Craon, Prince of Craon (1679–1754)
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DateMediumMeasurements
Price (GBP)Export Price (EUR)Export Price (USD)
Price (GBP)Export Price (EUR)Export Price (USD)
18th CenturyOil on canvas125 x 106cm49 x 41.5 in.
£8,650€9,250*$10,450*
£8,650€9,250*$10,450*
*Available for works shipped outside the UK. Based on current exchange rates - subject to change
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at a glance
Few early eighteenth-century portraits unite such imposing decorative presence with so richly documented a human story. This commanding image represents Marc de Beauvau-Craon (1679–1754), one of the most influential figures at the court of Lorraine: intimate of Duke Léopold, Grand Equerry and Grand Constable of Lorraine, tutor to the future Emperor Francis I, later Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Grandee of Spain and, ultimately, the effective viceroy of Tuscany. His life led from the court at Lunéville to the highest circles of Habsburg Europe, while the great château he created at Haroué (see image) remains one of the architectural monuments of eighteenth-century Lorraine. This is therefore far more than an anonymous man in armour: it is the image of a dynasty and of a court whose independence was nearing its end.
provenance
The sitter appears at three-quarter length in the grand martial language perfected around 1700. Polished dark armour is relieved by gilded details; a crimson mantle sweeps behind him and across the lower composition; and an immense white silk sash is tied around his waist. His outstretched arm leads the eye to a helmet crowned by a spectacular plume of black feathers. Lace at the neck and wrist tempers the military display with courtly refinement, while the full-bottomed wig falls in ordered waves almost to his waist. Such wigs reached their most magnificent form during the later reign of Louis XIV and the opening decades of the eighteenth century. The white sash, helmet and armour belong to the established vocabulary of military command in French portraiture: they announce authority rather than depict a man dressed for an actual battlefield.
The man behind this splendid apparatus belonged to one of Lorraine’s great lineages. The Beauvau were an ancient Angevin family whose history became joined to that of the Craon through the fifteenth-century marriage of Pierre de Beauvau and Jeanne de Craon. Family tradition relates that Jeanne, dying after the birth of their son, required that her descendants preserve the Craon arms, giving rise to the name Beauvau-Craon. The family followed René d’Anjou into Lorraine and became deeply embedded in ducal service. Marc’s father, Louis de Beauvau, Marquis de Beauvau, served the Duke of Lorraine as counsellor and captain of his guards; his mother, Anne-Henriette de Ligny du Charmel, brought another established Lorrainese lineage into the family. Service to the dynasty was thus Marc’s inheritance as much as his career.
That relationship became intensely personal. Marc grew up close to Léopold, Duke of Lorraine, and the two remained intimates as adults. Léopold had returned to his duchies only after the Treaty of Ryswick restored Lorraine in 1697 following decades of warfare and French occupation. Marc served first as chamberlain and from 1711 as Grand Equerry, one of the great offices of the court. When Léopold died in 1729, Marc carried the great sword of sovereignty in the funeral rites at Nancy and raised it in the ceremony proclaiming the new duke. That sword survives in the Musée Lorrain. Contemporary writers remembered Marc as an unusually agreeable and cultivated man—witty, knowledgeable, naturally cheerful and an able administrator—qualities that help explain the remarkable confidence placed in him.
In 1704 he married Anne-Marguerite de Ligniville, aged eighteen, daughter of Melchior de Ligniville, Marshal of Lorraine, and Marguerite-Antoinette de Bouzey. The Ligniville were counted among the celebrated “Grands Chevaux de Lorraine”, the small group regarded as the oldest stratum of the duchy’s chivalric nobility. The marriage also produced one of the more extraordinary stories of the Lunéville court. Anne-Marguerite became a lady of honour to the duchess and later the acknowledged favourite of Duke Léopold, yet Marc’s intimacy with his sovereign survived and his influence continued to increase. Behind the formal splendour of this portrait therefore lies a distinctly human world of friendship, marriage, ambition and court favour.
Marc and Anne-Marguerite had twenty children—eight sons and twelve daughters—and the family became a network linking Lorraine with the highest aristocracy of France. Their daughter Anne-Marguerite-Gabrielle married Jacques-Henri de Lorraine, Prince of Lixheim, in 1721. Marc commissioned Claude Jacquart to record the magnificent wedding procession leaving the château of Lunéville, a painting that survives today and marks the family’s entry into the wider kinship of the ruling house. Another daughter, Marie-Françoise-Catherine, Marquise de Boufflers, became one of the most celebrated women at the later court of Stanislas Leszczynski and his official favourite. Their son Charles-Juste would become a Marshal of France and a member of the Académie française. Few families illustrate more vividly the mobility of the eighteenth-century European aristocracy.
For many years Marc’s life centred on Lunéville, where he occupied an apartment in the ducal complex and where Jacques Van Schuppen was employed to decorate a ceiling for him. From 1720 he created a more permanent monument to his success. Germain Boffrand, one of the foremost architects of the age, was commissioned to rebuild Haroué as the family seat. Completed over nine years, the château incorporated the moat and towers of the earlier fortress into an elegant modern residence. According to its celebrated architectural conceit, Haroué can be read as a calendar: 365 windows for the days, 52 chimneys for the weeks, 12 towers and turrets for the months and four bridges for the seasons. It remains the great physical expression of the world Marc built around his family.
His advancement was equally striking. He became Marquis de Craon in 1712 and Prince of the Holy Roman Empire in 1722, and later received the dignity of Grandee of Spain. Léopold entrusted him with the education of his heir, François-Étienne of Lorraine, whose destiny transformed European politics. François-Étienne married Maria Theresa of Austria, exchanged Lorraine for Tuscany and in 1745 became Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. Marc followed his former pupil into this new political order: in Florence he presided over the Council of Regency and acted in effect as viceroy of Tuscany. The courtier from Lunéville had become an administrator on the European stage. He died in 1754 at Haroué, the house that most eloquently embodied his ascent.
The composition itself belongs to the crucial years around 1710–11. Its prime version, now in the Musée Lorrain at Nancy, has long been associated with Hyacinthe Rigaud and his workshop and is dated to about 1711. The identification as Marc de Beauvau-Craon is strengthened by the armorial setting of that picture, incorporating the arms of Beauvau-Craon and Ligniville with emblems of high Lorrainese office, although Marc’s name is absent from Rigaud’s surviving account books and a degree of scholarly caution remains appropriate. The present painting is an eighteenth-century repetition of that celebrated composition, retaining its commanding format and rhetoric. The timing is telling: Marc became Grand Equerry in 1711 and Marquis de Craon the following year, making the original portrait entirely appropriate as an image of advancement and newly consolidated authority.
Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743) was the defining French portraitist of the age of Louis XIV. Born in Perpignan and established in Paris by 1681, he became the principal painter of the king and court, creating the visual language through which rulers, princes, marshals and ministers wished to be seen. His celebrated portrait of Louis XIV in coronation robes, painted in 1701, helped establish the vocabulary of sumptuous drapery, commanding gesture and calculated magnificence that echoed through European portraiture for generations. Rigaud maintained a large and highly organised studio, and repetitions and variants allowed prestigious likenesses and compositions to circulate among an international aristocratic clientele. At the upper end of the portrait market such images were costly instruments of status, while studio repetitions extended their reach through aristocratic families and affiliated households.
Around 1711 this language had particular force in Lorraine. Europe remained embroiled in the War of the Spanish Succession; Nancy had been occupied by French troops since 1702, prompting Léopold to centre his court at Lunéville. Yet the duchy invested conspicuously in architecture, ceremony and portraiture, recruiting French artists and rebuilding residences as assertions of sovereign identity. Within that setting, the martial splendour of the Beauvau-Craon composition was not empty theatre: it expressed the rank, service and political aspiration of a man rising with extraordinary speed.
The portrait consequently combines the qualities that make historic portraiture especially compelling: a sitter whose remarkable life can be reconstructed in vivid detail; associations with the sovereign court of Lorraine, Lunéville and the Château de Haroué; a composition rooted in the orbit of Rigaud, the supreme portraitist of Louis XIV’s age; and a magnificent visual scheme of black armour, crimson drapery, white silk, lace and cascading hair. It is both a serious historical portrait and a wonderfully decorative object—commanding from across a room, yet enriched at close quarters by the story of the man, marriage, dynasty and vanished court behind the image.
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