Miniature attribuated to Hubert DROUAIS (father)(1699-1767)

The work offers us an unpublished portrait of Pierre V de Parseval (1724-1782), advisor to the king, one of the last general farmers, administrator of the Hôtel-Dieu and the hospital of incurables of Paris.

Miniature on vellum, brilliantly executed, possessing a broad touch with bluish highlights, very peculiar, which inscribes it in a group of portraits in miniature (that we have or have had), all of the same hand, all painted on velum, around 1750, all of a remarkable quality and all of the entourage of the members of the court of Versailles. (Famille de Parseval, de Villegagnon, de La Gherche, de Monmartel...).

See in our gallery the portrait of Jean Paris de Monmartel ( financier under Louis XIV then Louis XV) reproduced by Henri Bouchot in his book "la miniature Française", in 1907, and given at the time of Henri Bouchot to François Hubert Drouais son. It is more agreed today that only the father, Hubert Drouais, painted miniatures. But we do not know any miniature signed either one or the other.

Drouais, was painter of the Plaisirs menus, appointed in 1744 ordinary painter of King Louis XV and of Madame de Pompadour, was, according to the witnesses of the time, a remarkable portrait painter in miniature.

We thus keep the very probable attribution of Henri Bouchot to the Drouais, but rather to the father, for this miniature as for all those executed with the same hand around 1750.

In a painting of 1767 by Guillaume Voiriot (1713-1799) and exhibited the same year at the Salon de Diderot, we find another portrait of Pierre V de Parseval, with his wife Anne-Henriette born André de La Guerche and five of their children, from left to right: Alexandre Philbert Pierre de Parseval (Guillotiné), Charles-René de Parseval Sieur de de Frileuse (Guillotiné), François Marie de Parseval Sieur de la Thuilerie, Anne Sophie Augustine future wife of Jacques de Saint-Didier, Augustine Scholastique Victoire, future wife of Denis de de Vernan (Guillotiné) (BdeRauglaudre, parseval.net)