Jean-François De Troy

Bio

De Troy was born in Paris, the son of another accomplished artist, François de Troy (1645-1730), a portrait painter from Toulouse and friend of Rigaud and Largilliére. As a boy, Jean François already displayed the skills of a natural painter and decorator. Between 1698 and 1706 he visited Italy, where he was strongly influenced by Venetian art, and expanded his horizons as a pensioner at the Academy in Rome.

On his return to Paris in 1706 he began an orthodox career as a history painter and, in 1708, was received as a full member of the Royal Academy. As a charming and talented young artist and the son of a successful society portraitist he was well received by the leaders of fashionable Paris and it was not long before De Troy met two of the greatest patrons of the day, the financiers Samuel Bernard and Christophe de La Live. The former commissioned a major series of four large Roman history subjects (now in Neuch,tel) in 1723, and the artist executed a splendid series of thirty five allegorical panels for the latter’s hotel particulier on the rue Neuve du Luxembourg between 1726-27.

De Troy’s early works were almost exclusively history subjects from the classics and, indeed, these were to be the mainstay of his later career and the basis for his official reputation. It was his more intimate tableaux de mode, however, that proved more popular with the Parisian public and which set him apart from his contemporaries. De Troy’s speedy facility with the brush enabled him to produce a prodigious quantity of work during brief periods of energetic creation, alternating with intervals of self-indulgent idleness.

Nonetheless, when driven by his overriding ambition he competed ardently for work, deliberately undercutting the prices of his great rival, FranÁois LeMoyne, with whom he contended for the post of Premier Peintre. When this great office ultimately went to LeMoyne in 1736, de Troy turned to enlarging his clientele, receiving a series of major commissions from the Crown which began with the decorations for the Chambre de la Reine, in collaboration with the younger Boucher and Natoire.
The King’s preference for less serious subjects in his private chambers had given de Troy the opportunity he had been looking for to produce large scale works in the manner of his tableaux de mode, notably the Oyster Dinner (as a pendant for Lancret’s Ham Dinner, now both at Chantilly) in 1735, and in the following year the Hunt Breakfast and Stag at Bay for Fontainebleau (lost). In 1738 he obtained the appointment of director of the Rome Academy but, prior to his departure, began the series of sketches for his first set of tapestries based on the story of Esther.

When these were first exhibited in 1737 they were widely acclaimed for their vigor and confident paintwork, contrasted. with the more highly finished large scale tapestry cartoons for which they were intended to be preparatory ideas. De Troy was not a great success as Director in Rome, his taste for hedonistic pleasures leading him to neglect his duties and attract the criticisms of the Director-General of the Buildings, his immediate superior.

Nonetheless he managed to retain his post until 1751 when, after a difference over a lady’s favors with Madame de Pompadour’s brother, the Marquis de Marigny, he was recalled to Paris and replaced by Natoire. De Troy’s Roman exile had removed him from the mainstream of artistic life and this, coupled with the love of luxury and pleasure this is reflected in the opulent settings of many of his paintings, deprived him of the occasion to fully develop his extraordinary talents. As Rigaud said of him, if his capacity to work had equaled his genius, painting would have had no finer representative.