Good morning. Let’s look at some art.
Destiny’s childThe exhibition of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum was the talk of London when I got to town. Lots of people were still jamming into the Tate Modern to see the Frida Kahlo show. Had I seen the bloody Anish Kapoor installation at the Hayward? Nope. My target was the National Gallery, where I wanted to visit a towering portrait of an 18th-century French nobleman, “Le Comte de Vaudreuil,” painted in 1758 by François-Hubert Drouais. That’s it, above the headline. ☝️ Even in this museum crowded with portraits of the wealthy, the Vaudreuil portrait stands out: imperious, childlike, pompous, vain. I don’t know what it’s like to have some kid dressed in sunglasses and Ralph Lauren Purple Label show up on my doorstep looking to pick my daughter up for a date. But I stare at this wigged broheim with some fast-running combination of fascination, worry, contempt and curiosity — and feel as if I might. In a museum, those are excellent things to feel. They’re a reminder of the power of art. Look at the guy yourself for a moment, with his teenage hauteur! Observe his rosebud lips and apple-hued cheeks, his doe eyes, perfect grooming and shining velvet clothes stitched with gold. Check out those red-heeled Louboutin-style slippers while you’re at it: talons rouges, uniform of the royal court. He’s pointing at a map of the Caribbean, not so much to show you something as to declare it is what he owns.
Who is this character? Beyond his title, the count has a mouthful of a name: Joseph Hyacinthe François de Paule de Rigaud. He was born in 1740 on the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), the son of the governor, whose family wealth derived from vast sugar plantations worked by laborers held in slavery. That wealth brought the count to Paris, bought him his clothes, bought him his Drouais portrait and eventually allowed him to amass one of the great art collections in France. He’s 18 here, new to Europe. Something about his portrait reminds me of the work of the photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who has spent decades documenting the lives and milieu of the wealthy. Greenfield has a particularly great eye for rich young people like Vaudreuil, scions who present themselves as people in full. She captures the essential falsity of that notion while allowing her subjects to maintain their self-confidence, their sense of self-worth. Drouais, too. Meredith Martin and Hannah Williams, art historians who’ve been studying art in 18th-century France for years, and who’ve written movingly about Vaudreuil’s portrait, suggest that getting the artist to paint it was savvy. In 1757, Drouais was well on his way to becoming the leading portraitist of Parisian high society. If you wanted to make a statement about your place in it, he’d be your guy. Martin told me the scale of the painting alone — it’s more than seven feet tall and just over five feet wide — is of the type “usually reserved only for royalty.” Certainly Drouais gave Vaudreuil the royal treatment. His pose is nearly casual, free of the military stiffness that you might expect from someone with a heap of armor at his feet (look to the right of the count’s left foot). “He’s relaxed,” Martin told me. “There’s something brash about how he’s thrown his hat and gloves down on the chair.”
The setting is definitely grand: a map room of the sort that Martin said would be rare even in the grandest of Parisian homes, with beautifully patterned wood floors and gold leaf everywhere. And take a close look at how the count inhabits the space, at how he’s pulling the map from the wall and stabbing his forefinger at the place where his father’s plantations lie: This is where it’s at. Look at the guy again. Behind Vaudreuil is another map: continental Europe, theater of the Seven Years’ War, where the count had been a short-lived junior officer. Remember the pile of armor? The painting seems to say: Forget about Europe, about wars on horseback. That’s the past. Look to the Caribbean instead, to the riches waiting there. The French Revolution sent Vaudreuil packing in 1789. Two years later, revolution in Haiti took his family’s holdings. I walked out into the London afternoon feeling pretty grand. Related: The white manager on Vaudreuil’s plantations had a child with an enslaved worker there. That son is depicted in another painting in a London museum. Martin and Williams tracked down one of his descendants, Madeleine Le Cesne, a poet and scholar from Louisiana. Then they shot a short film about both paintings with her. Watch.
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