Fig. 5. Radiograph of A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?)

Fig. 6. Photomicrograph of A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?), showing the ground and paint layers with numbers corresponding to the order of application: (1) light-gray ground, (2) greenish-blue wash, and (3) brown paint

Fig. 7. Photomicrograph of the canapé, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?)

Fig. 8. Photomicrograph of the wall, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?)

Fig. 9. Photomicrograph of the man’s face, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?)

Fig 10. Photomicrograph of the man’s inner coat, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?)

Fig 11. Photograph captured during the 1982 treatment of A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?), taken before retouching

Fig. 12. Details captured during the 1982 treatment of A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?), showing the leftmost woman’s face before retouching (top) and after retouching (bottom)

Fig. 13. UV-induced visible fluorescence photograph, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (1764?)

Fig. 14. Radiograph of A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?)

Fig. 15. Photomicrograph of the vanity table, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?)

Fig. 16. Photomicrograph of the items on the vanity table, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?)

Fig. 17. Photomicrograph of the man’s face, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?)

Fig. 18. Photomicrograph of the aristocratic woman’s face, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?)

Fig. 19. Photograph captured during the 1982 treatment of A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?), taken before retouching

Fig. 20. Photomicrograph of the letter in A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?)

Fig. 21. Photograph captured during the 1982 treatment of A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?), taken before retouching (left) and after retouching (right)

Fig. 22. Ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence image of A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?)

After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1764 (?), and A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?)

doi: 10.37764/78973.5.312
Artist	After Jean François de Troy, French, 1679–1752
Title	A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword
Object Date	1764 (?)
Alternate and Variant Titles	Scène galante; Jeune femme attachant un ruban à l’épée d’un jeune homme; Une dame attachant un nœud à l’épée d’un gentilhomme; Dame attachant un nœud à l’épée d’un cavalier
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions (Unframed)	25 1/2 x 18 in. (64.8 x 45.7 cm)
Credit Line	The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 82-36/1

Download PDF
doi: 10.37764/78973.5.313
Artist	After Jean François de Troy, French, 1679–1752
Title	A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor
Object Date	1764 (?)
Alternate and Variant Titles	Scène galante; Dame à sa toilette recevant un cavalier
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions (Unframed)	25 1/2 x 18 in. (64.8 x 45.7 cm)
Inscription	Inscribed on letter in lower right: 1764 [?]
Credit Line	The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Purchase: William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 82-36/2

Catalogue Entry

curatorial

Citation

Chicago:

Nicole R. Myers, “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, and A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?),” catalogue entry in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.312.5407.

MLA:

Myers, Nicole R. “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, and A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?),” catalogue entry. French Paintings and Pastels and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/78973.5.312.5407.

In 1724, on the day of the Fête Dieu (the feast of Corpus Christi, May 30), Jean François de Troy (1679–1752) presented his work publicly for the first time in an exhibition of young painters held in Paris in the Place Dauphine. Among his submissions was a small genregenre: Figural scenes of ordinary people engaged in the activities of everyday life. painting, The Declaration of Love (ca. 1724; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which caught the attention of the important collector, dealer, and author Pierre Jean Mariette. He wrote: “We note from M. de Troy le fils [the son], already known for his large paintings, a work that brings much honor to his brush, thanks to the harmony, the gallant taste, and the truthfulness with which it is composed.”¹“On voyait de M. de Troye, le fils, déjà connu par de plus grands ouvrages, un Tableau qui fait beaucoup d’honneur à son pinceau, par l’entente et le goût galant et vrai dont il est composé. C’est un jeune Cavalier en habit de velours, dont l’étoffe est véritablement moëlleuse, auprès d’une Dame assise sur un canapé.” “Extraits de diverses Lettres,” Mercure de France (June 1724): 1391; repr. Mercure de France VI January–June 1724 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968), 370. Translated in Colin Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaetgens, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, ed. Colin B. Bailey (New Haven: Yale University, 2003), 10. As Mariette observed, the painting marked a departure for the young artist, who until then had made his name as a history painter, the category ranked highest by the prestigious Royal Academy of Painting and SculptureSalon, the: Exhibitions organized by the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture) and its successor the Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux Arts), which took place in Paris from 1667 onward. in its hierarchy of subjects.

Born in 1679, De Troy was trained by his father, the eminent portraitist François de Troy (1645–1730), in addition to receiving formal lessons at the academy. Around 1699, his father sent him to continue his studies in Italy, and he spent considerable time in Rome, Florence, and Pisa before returning to Paris in 1706. Two years later, De Troy was simultaneously agréé (accepted) and reçu (received) by the academy as a history painter, with Niobe and Her Children (1708; Musée Fabre, Montpellier) as his morceau de reception (reception piece). De Troy went on to build his reputation with such monumental works as The Plague at Marseilles (ca. 1722; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles) and a series of paintings commemorating the life of Saint Vincent de Paul (commissioned for the Mission Saint-Lazare, Paris, in 1729; now in various locations). In the category of history painting, De Troy was considered second only to one during his lifetime: his rival François Lemoyne (1688–1737).

Mariette might thus have been surprised to discover The Declaration of Love, De Troy’s first foray into genre painting, but it nonetheless seduced him with its charm, refinement, and novelty. With the painting and its pendantpendant: One of two paintings conceived as a pair and intended to be displayed togther., The Garter (1724; Metropolitan Museum of Art), which debuted the following year at the Salon of 1725, De Troy introduced a new pictorial form. Dubbed tableaux de mode (pictures of fashionable society) by his contemporaries, these paintings took as their subjects the leisure activities, social rituals, and intimate moments of the eighteenth-century Parisian elite.²The term tableaux de mode appears in texts by Jean Pierre Mariette and in the Mercure de France. Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752), cat. rais. (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 72. The original versions of A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor and A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (Figs. 1, 2)—of which the Nelson-Atkins paintings are copies—are among the approximately ten tableaux de mode that De Troy created in Paris between 1724 and 1738, the year he was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome. Differing from his large-scale religious and civic commissions, which were broadly painted in loose, sweeping strokes, his tableaux de mode were executed in a highly detailed and polished style reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre paintings. Indeed, the rising popularity of paintings from the Low Countries among connoisseurs and collectors during the first half of the eighteenth century provided the background against which the tableaux de mode were developed, received, and collected in France.³Colin B. Bailey, “Surveying Genre in Eighteenth-Century French Painting,” in Bailey et al., The Age of Watteau, 18–19; and Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 60.

Fig. 1. Jean François de Troy, *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor*, 1734, oil on canvas, 31 9/16 x 25 1/8 in. (81 x 64 cm), private collection; reproduced in Christophe Leribault, *Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752)* (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 334.

In addition to northern European cabinet pictures, De Troy was probably influenced by the French art forms they inspired, such as the fêtes galantes painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), which feature groups of elite upper-class men and women in conversation, role playing, dancing, or flirting outdoors.⁴Michael Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700–1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 21. However, unlike Dutch and Flemish genre painters, De Troy did not portray scenes of lower- and middle-class life or bawdy subjects such as taverns and brothels; nor did he create fantasy worlds within which his aristocratic characters played, as did Watteau and his followers.⁵Richard Rand, Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1997), 5. De Troy’s tableaux de mode instead portray everyday upper-class life with the narrative clarity of history painting. As Christophe Leribault has argued, De Troy employed strategies drawn from his experience as a history painter—the rhetoric of gesture, compositional organization, and details of setting and costume—to relay anecdotal stories of upper-class sociability. Although the subjects of tableaux de mode were considered trite by the second half of the eighteenth century—due in part to their widespread circulation as engravings—they were entirely innovative in the mid-1720s.⁶Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 62; Bailey et al., The Age of Watteau, p. 166, entry no. 24. Indeed, the tableau de mode was regarded by contemporary viewers as a truly French pictorial form that reflected the taste and refinement of France’s elite in both subject and style.⁷Barbara Anderman, “La notion de peinture de genre à l’époque de Watteau” in Patrick Ramade and Martin P. Eidelberg, Watteau et la fête galante, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), 35. See also Jörg Ebeling, “Upwardly Mobile: Genre Painting and the Conflict between Landed and Moneyed Interests,” in Philip Conisbee, ed., French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 73–89.

De Troy probably designed his tableaux de mode with their final destinations in mind. The growing appreciation of detailed, small-scale paintings depicting pleasant subjects coincided with a shift in the living conditions of the French aristocracy and haute bourgeoisiehaute bourgeoisie: French for ”the upper middle class“. Following the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the subsequent loosening of rules demanding that nobles live public lives at Versailles, members of the aristocracy were eager to relocate to Paris. They sparked a veritable housing boom with the construction of hôtels particuliershôtel particulier: A grand, urban mansion for a private citizen that does not share party walls with residences nearby., a trend that quickly spread to the new class of socially aspiring nouveaux riches. These townhouses feature private rooms on an intimate scale, a first in upper-class living. Paintings took on a decorative function within these new interiors and presented lighthearted subjects deemed appropriate for the informal rooms in which they were displayed.⁸Thomas W. Gaetgens, “Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century Collections,” in Bailey et al., The Age of Watteau, 81; Joan DeJean, “A New Interiority: The Architecture of Privacy in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” in Charissa Bremer-David, ed. Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 34; and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, “French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour,” in Penelope Hunter-Stiebel et al., La Volupté du Gout: French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2008), 20. Within this context, De Troy’s tableaux de mode—and even copies after them—found a ready market among almost all levels of elite society: nobles at court, aristocrats, and wealthy members of the haute bourgeoisie, such as financiers and fermiers générauxfermier général: French for “general farmer.” A private citizen who collects taxes on behalf of the French monarchy..⁹De Troy was also a member of the social elite, having married a wealthy woman whose fortune allowed him to purchase the rank of secrétaire du roi du grand collège (secretary to the king of the grand college) in 1737. Many of de Troy’s contemporaries remarked on his elevated social position and the worldly milieu with which he associated. See Ebeling, “Upwardly Mobile,” 73; A[ntoine]-J[oseph] Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres (1762; repr. Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1972), 4:368; and Chevalier de Valory, “Jean-François de Troy,” in L. Dussieux et al., Mémoires Inédits sur la Vie et les Ouvrages des Membres de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1854; Paris: F. de Nobele, 1968), 2:260–61. Collectively, in their depiction of chivalrous scenarios unfolding in salons, boudoirs, and private gardens, tableaux de mode mirrored the social activities and aspirations of the collectors who bought them and hung them in their homes.

The two Nelson-Atkins pictures are high-quality copies of the original set of paintings (see Figs. 1, 2), which De Troy first exhibited in the place Dauphine in 1734 and were presumably purchased shortly thereafter by Germain-Louis Chauvelin (1685–1762), keeper of seals and secretary of state for foreign affairs.¹⁰Germain Louis Chauvelin, a financier, belonged to the class of nouveaux riches and haute bourgeois that made up part of de Troy’s clientele. Denise Amy Baxter, “Parvenu or honnête homme: The Collecting Practices of Germain-Louis de Chauvelin,” Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (2008): 273–89. Conceived as pendants, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor and A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword represent the gallantry, harmony, and truthfulness so admired by Mariette. Both paintings reveal an intimate yet genteel moment shared between lovers within private living quarters and rendered in seductive detail.

The costumes and furnishings within these scenes are depicted so accurately that they could serve as historical illustrations of fashion and décor during the French Regency period (ca. 1710–35). Indeed, nearly all the decorative objects can be identified and matched to extant examples. A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor features an elegant woman completing the last steps of her morning toilette. A chambermaid helps her into a richly brocaded silk gown known as a robe volante, while she shows her male companion a piece of jewelry that presumably will complete her ensemble. She stands before the red-lacquered mirror of her toilette service, a lavish set of silver and lacquer boxes used to store essential articles such as brushes, wigs, powders, and makeup.¹¹Monika Kopplin, European Lacquer: Selected Works for the Museum für Lackkunst Münster (Munich: Hirmer, 2010), 110. Few complete toilette sets have survived intact; this is in fact a rare illustration of Regency silver that closely resembles a toilette set made in ca. 1695 by Philip Rollos (English, ca. 1660–after 1715) in the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, nos. LOAN:GILBERT.623–37:1-2008; see Denise Amy Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability in Jean-François de Troy’s tableaux de mode, 1725–1738: Defining a Fashionable Genre in Early Eighteenth-Century France,” in Alden Cavanaugh, ed., Performing the “Everyday”: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat. (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 31. The toilette set is spread out on a simple table covered by an embroidered muslin petite toile (small tablecloth) placed over a silk cloth.¹²Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1929 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 109; and Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, “Dressing to Impress: The Morning Toilette and the Fabrication of Femininity,” in Bremer-David, ed., Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 55–56. On the shelves of the three-tiered corner cupboard are a monochrome Chinese porcelain vessel in a gilt-bronze mount,¹³My sincere thanks go to Katelyn Bennett, Nelson-Atkins French paintings catalogue intern, for her research and identification of this previously undocumented object. This pot with a lid and no handles may have had a functional use as a perfume burner. French collectors appreciated monochrome Chinese porcelains for their brilliant shine and reflective quality, which in the de Troy painting resembles that of glass. These luxury porcelains were very costly due to the difficulty in achieving an even glaze as well as their relative scarcity, since they were exported from China in small quantities. See Kristel Smentek, Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East (New York: Frick Collection, 2007), 13–14. a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain kêndi (jug) in the form of an elephant,¹⁴D. F. Lunsingh Scheurleer, Chinese Export Porcelain: “Chine de Commande” (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 50–51. and a silver basin and ewer that would have contained scented water for washing hands.¹⁵Chrisman-Campbell, “Dressing to Impress,” 56. The walls are decorated with gilded boiseries (paneling) into which is set a ledge displaying a Chinese porcelain vase and a large mirror. The canapé (sofa) is pushed up against the wall, its curved back designed specifically to fit the wall molding above.¹⁶Pierre Verlet, La Maison du XVIII^e Siècle en France: Société Décoration Mobilier (Paris: Baschet, 1966), 134–36. This decor would have been seen by eighteenth-century viewers as both luxurious and modern, since the goût chinois (Chinese taste) represented by the imported lacquer and porcelain pieces enjoyed widespread popularity by the 1730s.¹⁷Kopplin, European Lacquer, 90, 93.

Equally realistic is the interior depicted in A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword. Once again, De Troy has rendered a sumptuous salon interior, featuring a green silk curtain and matching canapé set into a wall adorned with gilded boiseries. In the middle of the central panel is a ledge supporting an elaborate gilt-bronze clock whose design can be attributed to André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732), chief cabinetmaker to the king.¹⁸Everett Fahy, ed., Wrightsman Pictures (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 163, 166; and Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability,” 31. De Troy included this same clock in The Garter (1724; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and The Reading of Molière (ca. 1728; private collection). The floor displays the wood parquet that was typical of eighteenth-century Parisian hôtels particuliers. Here, the lady is shown en deshabillée (partial undress), wearing a loose silk sack dress and low-heeled slippers, a casual and comfortable ensemble that was typically worn in the home in the morning. Having selected a yellow ribbon from the wares of the marchande de modesmarchande de modes: A vendor who supplied women’s fashion accessories, such as trimmings to decorate caps and shawls. seated on the floor, she ties it around the hilt of her suitor’s sword. The embellishment matches the gentleman’s embroidered yellow waistcoat, which peeks out from under his justaucorps (knee-length coat). His powdered hair is pulled back into a black silk bag wigbag wig: An eighteenth-century wig with hair that is tied in back and contained in a small silk sack or cloth bag. topped with a large bow; its loose ends are tied into another bow under his chin in a style known as a solitaire.¹⁹Maurice Leloir, Histoire du Costume de l’Antiquité à 1914 (Paris: Henri Ernst, 1938), 11:26, 28–29; and Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 29.

True to their function as pendants, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature and A Lady Attaching a Bow feature complementary scenes of upper-class women engaged in their morning toilettes. Although to modern eyes the presence of a man watching a lady get dressed might seem indecorous, in the eighteenth century the toilette was not a private act but one performed before an audience of friends, family, servants, merchants, and even high-ranking clergy. Dressing one’s hair and body during this period was particularly complicated and time-consuming, so both men and women of elite status used that time to receive visitors and conduct business.²⁰For an excellent discussion of the practice of the toilette and its visual representation in the eighteenth century, see Chrisman-Campbell, “Dressing to Impress,” especially pp. 53, 71, and Elise Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour at her toilette,” Simiolis, Netherlands quarterly for the history of art 17, no. 1 (1987): 41–58. While the act of dressing is explicitly shown in A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature, several details in A Lady Attaching a Bow reveal that this painting too depicts the morning toilette: the woman’s informal house attire, the presence of the marchande de modes, and the clock striking the visiting hour of 11:30 a.m.

In each painting, an object serves as the focus of the couples’ romantic exchanges, whether a piece of jewelry to be admired or a sword (a sign of aristocratic distinction) to be adorned.²¹Although modern scholars assume that the woman in A Lady Showing a Portrait Miniature to Her Suitor is showing her lover a portrait miniature of his likeness, descriptions of this object penned in the eighteenth century are varied. One author noted that the lady is giving her portrait to the suitor, while the catalogue accompanying Chauvelin’s sale in 1762 described it as a watch: “Deux autres tableaux aussi de mode, l’un une dame qui donne son portrait à un jeune homme, et l’autre une dame qui attache une nœud d’épée à un cavalier” (Two other tableaux de mode, in one a lady giving her portrait to a young man, and in the other a lady tying a sword knot to for knight). “Extrait de la vie de M. De Troy, peintre du roi et directeur de son Académie à Rome,” in Mémoires inédits, 275. “Dans l’un, une Dame attache un ruban à l’épée d’un Cavalier; dans l’autre, une Dame fait voir à un Monsieur, qui est assis proche à sa toilette, l’heure qu’il est” (In one, a Lady ties a ribbon to a knight’s sword; in the other, a lady shows a gentleman, who is sitting nearby at her toilette, what time it is). Catalogue des Tableaux, Estampes en livres et en feuilles, Cartes manuscrites et gravées, montées à gorges et rouleaux, du Cabinet de feu Messire Germain-Louis Chauvelin, Ministre d’Etat, Commandeur des Ordres du Roi, et Ancien Garde des Sceaux (Paris: Lottin et Musier, 1762), 9–10. Combined with the symbolism of other details in the composition, these props convey subtly erotic undertones. In A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature, the action of the lady handing her suitor the jewelry is doubled in the reflection of the lacquered mirror on the table, where their hands appear to be almost touching. The amorous nature of the couple’s relationship is further implied by the opened letter on the floor, perhaps a love letter or a note sent to announce the suitor’s impending visit.²²Rand, Intimate Encounters, 105. In A Lady Attaching a Bow, the sword that the gentleman eagerly extends toward the lady serves as a thinly veiled reference to the act of physical love. This message is echoed by the clock on which Cupid, god of erotic love, brandishes a scythe over Father Time, declaring the triumph of love over time.²³Rand, Intimate Encounters, 105. Tempering these more or less overt sexual allusions is the inclusion of the chambermaid and marchande de modes, whose presence ensures a façade of propriety.

Despite the exactitude of the costumes, decorative objects, and everyday activities, De Troy’s tableaux de mode are ultimately selective in their realism.²⁴Bailey et al., The Age of Watteau, 23. For example, the figures all look the same from painting to painting,²⁵The similarity in the appearance of de Troy’s women was noted by at least one of his contemporaries, Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, who was prompted to explain that de Troy was so smitten with his young wife that he painted her head (always in profile to hide a cataract) in all his gallant paintings; d’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, 4:368. and with their emphasis on the latest fashions they resemble the printed fashion plates that circulated widely in France beginning in the seventeenth century. The morning toilette was a popular setting in these prints and may have inspired De Troy in his selection of subjects (Fig. 3).²⁶Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour,” 47–48; and Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability,” 31. The term tableaux de mode, in fact, suggests his contemporaries’ awareness of this connection and of the elements of fantasy found in this kind of image. As Leribault has argued, these illustrations of social interactions fall perfectly in line with the narratives of sentimental novels of the period. Their appeal and power reside precisely in the fact that they reflect an idealized world of beauty, refinement, and chivalry among the privileged classes.²⁷Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 72.

Fig. 3. Henri Bonnart (1642–1711), *Collection of Fashions of the French Court, “Lady at Her Toilette*,” 1687, hand-colored engraving on paper, sheet: 14 3/8 x 9 3/8 in. (36.5 x 23.8 cm); image: 10 3/4 x 7 1/2 in. (27.3 x 19 cm), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.2002.57.81

The circumstances behind the creation of the Nelson-Atkins pendants remain elusive, as there is no record of these copies’ existence before the museum purchased them in 1982. Moreover, nearly nothing is known about De Troy’s studio practice and whether he employed assistants in the making of the few high-quality replicas currently attributed to him, such as the replicas of The Declaration of Love and The Garter at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.²⁸Of de Troy’s tableaux de mode, the Nelson-Atkins pictures are the only other known copies. For the Williams College versions, see https://egallery.williams.edu/objects/10412/la-declaration-damour and https://egallery.williams.edu/objects/22393/la-conversation-galante. The Williamstown pair is almost identical to the original set at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in both size and fidelity to the composition. They only differ in their handling (which Leribault describes as less lively) and the absence of a signature and date. As Leribault notes in his catalogue raisonné, in light of these compositions’ popularity when they were exhibited in 1724 and again at the Salon of 1725, it is not surprising that there was a demand for copies. Who made them, though, is an open question. De Troy may very well have supervised assistants in the production of such high-quality copies, as was typical of the period; however, lacking documentation of this practice, Leribault credits De Troy with their execution.

Unlike the replicas in Williamstown, the Nelson-Atkins pictures are smaller than the originals and exhibit slight alterations in their compositions. Perhaps to compensate for the narrower proportions of the copies, both compositions were enlarged on all four sides (most noticeably at the top and bottom), which sets the figures farther back from the picture plane. A noticeable discrepancy can be seen in the appearance of the figures’ faces, particularly the two female figures in A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword and the chambermaid in A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor. They do not display the highly stylized, homogenous facial features that usually characterize De Troy’s subjects. This, however, is the result of past abrasionabrasion: A loss of surface material due to rubbing, scraping, frequent touching, or inexpert solvent cleaning. and subsequent restoration.²⁹See technical notes by Mary Schafer, NAMA paintings conservator, April 1, 2011 (82-36/1) and April 6, 2011 (82-36/2), NAMA conservation files. Pre-treatment photographs of the abraded areas reveal that what is left of the original paint surface closely resembles the faces in the original versions. Thus, with a few exceptions, the Nelson-Atkins pendants are rather faithful transcriptions of the originals.³⁰The skirt of the lady’s pink sack dress in A Lady Attaching a Bow is missing the central seam; otherwise, there are no significant changes beyond the enlarged composition; see Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 335. So exact are their details and matching palettes that, in the absence of other known, high-quality copies that could have served as models, it is not unreasonable to speculate the Nelson-Atkins copies were made directly from the originals.

Leribault posits that the Nelson-Atkins paintings could be autograph copies, and he attributes them to Jean François de Troy despite a certain “dryness” in their surface treatment and lesser quality.³¹Due to the virtual inaccessibility of the original versions, which are now housed in a private collection, assessments of their quality and comparisons to the Nelson-Atkins paintings have relied exclusively upon reproductions, including Leribault’s entries in the de Troy catalogue raisonné. Nevertheless, an attribution to De Troy remains problematic. While the issue of quality has remained central to many scholars and connoisseurs, it is in fact a discrepancy in the inscriptions that builds the strongest case against an attribution to De Troy. In the original pair, A Lady at Her Toilette is signed “De Troy” on the letter at the lower right, and the box in the center foreground of A Lady Attaching a Bow is inscribed “DETROY 1734.” Neither of the Nelson-Atkins copies is signed; however, the copy of A Lady Showing a Bracelet presents a date on the crumpled letter of “17[6?]4” (Fig. 4).³²The Williamstown copies omit altogether the inscriptions on the Wrightsman paintings. Painted wet-into-wetwet-into-wet: An oil painting technique which involves blending of colors on the picture surface., this inscription appears to date to the time of the copy’s creation and remains in good condition.³³See Schafer, technical notes, April 6, 2011 (82–36/2), NAMA conservation files. The third digit is difficult to decipher, even when viewed with a microscope. Nevertheless, its curved shape rules out the number 3 (and thus a date of 1734); it most closely resembles a 6.³⁴The number’s curved shape also rules out a 4 (for 1744), the only other number that would have indicated a possible date for the painting’s execution within de Troy’s lifetime. If the inscription indeed reads 1764, it dates the copy, and presumably its pendant, to twelve years after De Troy’s death in 1752.

Fig. 4. Detail of the letter on the floor, *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor*, 1764 (?)

The original pendants were sold in 1762 following the death of Chauvelin, their first owner, who had kept the paintings for nearly thirty years. Unlike many of De Troy’s tableaux de mode, the original versions were never engraved and thus probably remained largely unknown until they resurfaced on the market. One can easily imagine that this rediscovery in 1762 prompted a new appreciation for these elegant paintings, resulting in the production of copies around that time. The smaller, narrower dimensions of the copies now at the Nelson-Atkins could in fact reflect the proportions of a space for which they were specifically commissioned.

Despite our inability to attribute these pictures definitively, they are nonetheless high-quality copies that reflect De Troy’s great skill, innovation, and creativity. And although Mariette predicted that the tableaux de mode would not, in the end, form the basis of the artist’s reputation, it is precisely for these sophisticated depictions of upper-class gallantry that De Troy is best remembered and admired today.³⁵“Il a beaucoup plu [sic] à Paris par ses petits tableaux de modes, qui sont en effet plus soignés que ses grands tableaux d’histoire; mais je ne pense pas que ce soit sur ces ouvrages qu’il fonde sa réputation” (He greatly pleased Paris with his small fashion paintings, which are in fact more careful than his large historical paintings; but I don’t think it’s on these works that he bases his reputation). P[ierre] J[ean] Mariette, Abécédario de P. J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes, ed. Ph. De Chennevières and A. de Montaiglon (Paris: J.-B. Dumoulin, 1853–54), 2:101.

Nicole R. Myers

July 2018

Notes

“On voyait de M. de Troye, le fils, déjà connu par de plus grands ouvrages, un Tableau qui fait beaucoup d’honneur à son pinceau, par l’entente et le goût galant et vrai dont il est composé. C’est un jeune Cavalier en habit de velours, dont l’étoffe est véritablement moëlleuse, auprès d’une Dame assise sur un canapé.” “Extraits de diverses Lettres,” Mercure de France (June 1724): 1391; repr. Mercure de France, Tome VI, Janvier–Juin 1724 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968), 370. Translated in Colin Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University, 2003), 10.
The term tableaux de mode appears in texts by Jean Pierre Mariette and in the Mercure de France. Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 72.
Colin B. Bailey, “Surveying Genre in Eighteenth-Century French Painting,” in Bailey et al., Age of Watteau, 18–19; and Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 60.
Michael Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France, 1700–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 21.
Richard Rand, Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, exh. cat (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1997), 5.
Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 62; Bailey et al., Age of Watteau, 166, no. 24.
Barbara Anderman, “La notion de peinture de genre à l’époque de Watteau,” in Patrick Ramade and Martin P. Eidelberg, Watteau et la fête galante, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004), 35. See also Jörg Ebeling, “Upwardly Mobile: Genre Painting and the Conflict between Landed and Moneyed Interests,” in Philip Conisbee, ed., French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007), 73–89.
Thomas W. Gaehtgens, “Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century Collections,” in Bailey et al., Age of Watteau, 81; Joan DeJean, “A New Interiority: The Architecture of Privacy in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” in Charissa Bremer-David, ed., Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 34; and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, “French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour,” in Penelope Hunter-Stiebel et al., La Volupté du Gout: French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2008), 20.
De Troy was also a member of the social elite, having married a wealthy woman whose fortune allowed him to purchase the rank of secrétaire du roi du grand collège (secretary to the king of the grand college) in 1737. Many of De Troy’s contemporaries remarked on his elevated social position and the worldly milieu with which he associated. See Ebeling, “Upwardly Mobile,” 73; A[ntoine]-J[oseph] Dézallier d’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres (1762; repr. Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1972), 4:368; and Chevalier de Valory, “Jean-François de Troy,” in L. Dussieux et al., Mémoires Inédits sur la Vie et les Ouvrages des Membres de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1854; Paris: F. de Nobele, 1968), 2:260–61.
Germain Louis Chauvelin, a financier, belonged to the class of nouveaux riches and haute bourgeois that made up part of De Troy’s clientele. Denise Amy Baxter, “Parvenu or honnête homme: The Collecting Practices of Germain-Louis de Chauvelin,” Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (2008): 273–89.
Monika Kopplin, European Lacquer: Selected Works from the Museum für Lackkunst Münster (Munich: Hirmer, 2010), 110. Few complete toilette sets have survived intact; this is a rare illustration of French Regency silver that closely resembles a toilette set in the Gilbert Collection of Gold and Silver at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. See Denise Amy Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability in Jean-François de Troy’s Tableaux de Mode, 1725–1738: Defining a Fashionable Genre in Early Eighteenth-Century France,” in Alden Cavanaugh, ed., Performing the “Everyday”: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 31.
Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1929 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 109; and Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, “Dressing to Impress: The Morning Toilette and the Fabrication of Femininity,” in Bremer-David, ed., Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 55–56.
My sincere thanks go to Katelyn Bennett, Nelson-Atkins French paintings catalogue intern, for her research and identification of this previously undocumented object. This pot with a lid and no handles may have had a functional use as a perfume burner. French collectors appreciated monochrome Chinese porcelains for their brilliant shine and reflective quality, which in the De Troy painting resembles that of glass. These luxury porcelains were very costly due to the difficulty of achieving an even glaze as well as their relative scarcity, since they were exported from China in small quantities. See Kristel Smentek, Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East (New York: Frick Collection, 2007), 13–14.
D. F. Lunsingh Scheurleer, Chinese Export Porcelain: “Chine de Commande” (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 50–51.
Chrisman-Campbell, “Dressing to Impress,” 56.
Pierre Verlet, La Maison du XVIII^e Siècle en France: Société Décoration Mobilier (Paris: Baschet, 1966), 134–36.
Kopplin, European Lacquer, 90, 93.
Everett Fahy, ed., Wrightsman Pictures (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005), 163, 166; and Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability,” 31. De Troy included this same clock in The Garter (1724; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), and The Reading of Molière (ca. 1728; private collection).
Maurice Leloir, Histoire du Costume de l’Antiquité à 1914 (Paris: Henri Ernst, 1938), 11:26, 28–29; and Aileen Ribeiro, Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 29.
For an excellent discussion of the practice of the toilette and its visual representation in the eighteenth century, see Chrisman-Campbell, “Dressing to Impress,” esp. 53, 71; and Elise Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour at her Toilette,” Simiolus 17, no. 1 (1987): 41–58.
Although modern scholars assume that the woman in A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor is showing her lover a portrait miniature of his likeness, descriptions of this object penned in the eighteenth century are varied. One author noted that the lady is giving her own portrait to the suitor: “Deux autres tableaux aussi de mode, l’un une dame qui donne son portrait à un jeune homme, et l’autre une dame qui attache une nœud d’épée à un cavalier” (Two other tableaux de mode, in one a lady giving her portrait to a young man, and in the other a lady tying a sword knot to for knight); “Extrait de la vie de M. De Troy, peintre du roi et directeur de son Académie à Rome,” in Mémoires inédits, 275. The catalogue accompanying Chauvelin’s sale in 1762, however, described the object as a watch: “Dans l’un, une Dame attache un ruban à l’épée d’un Cavalier; dans l’autre, une Dame fait voir à un Monsieur, qui est assis proche à sa toilette, l’heure qu’il est” (In one, a lady ties a ribbon to a knight’s sword; in the other, a lady shows a gentleman, who is sitting nearby at her toilette, what time it is); Catalogue des Tableaux, Estampes en livres et en feuilles, Cartes manuscrites et gravées, montées à gorges et rouleaux, du Cabinet de feu Messire Germain-Louis Chauvelin, Ministre d’Etat, Commandeur des Ordres du Roi, et Ancien Garde des Sceaux (Paris: Lottin et Musier, 1762), 9–10. This and subsequent translations by the author.
Rand, Intimate Encounters, 105.
Rand, Intimate Encounters, 105.
Bailey et al., Age of Watteau, 23.
The similarity in the appearance of De Troy’s women was noted by at least one of his contemporaries, Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville, who was prompted to explain that De Troy was so smitten with his young wife that he painted her head (always in profile to hide a cataract) in all his gallant paintings; D’Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, 4:368.
Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour,” 47–48; and Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability,” 31.
Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 72.
Of De Troy’s tableaux de mode, the Nelson-Atkins pictures are the only other known copies. For the Williams College versions, see https://egallery.williams.edu/objects/10412/la-declaration-damour and https://egallery.williams.edu/objects/22393/la-conversation-galante.
See technical notes by Mary Schafer, NAMA paintings conservator, April 1, 2011 (82-36/1) and April 6, 2011 (82-36/2), NAMA conservation files.
The skirt of the lady’s pink sack dress in A Lady Attaching a Bow is missing the central seam; otherwise, there are no significant changes beyond the enlarged composition; see Leribault, Jean-François de Troy, 335.
Due to the virtual inaccessibility of the original versions, which are now housed in a private collection, assessments of their quality and comparisons to the Nelson-Atkins paintings have relied exclusively on reproductions, including Leribault’s entries in the De Troy catalogue raisonné.
The Williamstown copies omit altogether the inscriptions on the paintings at the Met.
See Schafer, technical notes, April 6, 2011 (82–36/2), NAMA conservation files.
The number’s curved shape also rules out a 4 (for 1744), the only other number that would have indicated a possible date for the painting’s execution within De Troy’s lifetime.
“Il a beaucoup plu [sic] à Paris par ses petits tableaux de modes, qui sont en effet plus soignés que ses grands tableaux d’histoire; mais je ne pense pas que ce soit sur ces ouvrages qu’il fonde sa réputation” (He greatly pleased Paris with his small fashion paintings, which are in fact more careful than his large historical paintings; but I do not think it is on these works that he bases his reputation). P[ierre] J[ean] Mariette, Abécédario de P. J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes, ed. Ph. de Chennevières and A. de Montaiglon (Paris: J.-B. Dumoulin, 1853–54), 2:101.

Top of section

After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1764 (?)

Technical Entry

conservation1

Citation

Chicago:

Sophia Boosalis, “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1764 (?),” technical entry in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2026), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.312.2088.

MLA:

Boosalis, Sophia. “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1764 (?),” technical entry. French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2026. doi: 10.37764/78973.5.312.2088.

A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword was executed on a fine, plain-weaveplain weave: A basic textile weave in which one weft thread alternates over and under the warp threads. Often this structure consists of one thread in each direction, but threads can be doubled (basket weave) or tripled to create more complex plain weave. Plain weave is sometimes called tabby weave. canvas with numerous slubs.¹Forrest Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1. Information about the original canvas is limited, as the tacking marginstacking margins: The outer edges of canvas that wrap around and are attached to the stretcher or strainer with tacks or staples. See also tacking edge. were removed during a lininglining: A procedure used to reinforce a weakened canvas that involves adhering a second fabric support using adhesive, most often a glue-paste mixture, wax, or synthetic adhesive. and the outer edges are now covered by fillfill material: A material added to a loss of paint and/or ground to create an area level with the surrounding original paint. and retouchingretouching: Paint application by a conservator or restorer to cover losses and unify the original composition. Retouching is an aspect of conservation treatment that is aesthetic in nature and that differs from more limited procedures undertaken solely to stabilize original material. Sometimes referred to as inpainting or retouch.. X-radiographyX-ray radiography (also referred to as x-radiography or radiography): Radiography is an examination tool analogous to the use of X-rays in medicine whereby denser components of a painted composition can be recorded as an inverted shadow image cast on film or a digital X-ray imaging plate from a source such as an X-ray tube. The method has been used for more than a century and is most effective with dense pigments incorporating metallic elements such as lead or zinc. It can reveal artist changes, underlying compositions, and information concerning the artwork’s construction and condition. The resulting image is called an x-radiograph or radiograph. It differs from the uses of X-ray spectrometry in being dependent on the density of the paint to absorb X-rays before they reach the film or image plate and being non-specific as to which elements are responsible for the resulting shadow image. confirms that the original canvas does not extend to the painting’s current outer edges (Fig. 5); a similar treatment was performed on A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (F82-36/2).²The radiograph is a composite of three film-based radiographs, with a black area representing a region that was not captured. See film-based radiographs, no.172, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1. However, the painting appears to be close to its original dimensions as strong cuspingcusping: A scalloped pattern along the canvas edges that relates to how the canvas was stretched. Primary cusping reveals where tacks secured the canvas to the support while the ground layer was applied. Secondary cusping can form when a pre-primed canvas is re-stretched by the artist prior to painting. is visible along all four edges. The canvas was prepared with a thickly applied light-gray groundground layer: An opaque preparatory layer applied to the support, either commercially or by the artist, to prevent absorption of the paint into the canvas or panel. See also priming layer. containing coarse particles.

Fig. 5. Radiograph of *A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword* (1764?)

No underdrawingunderdrawing: A drawn or painted sketch beneath the paint layer. The underdrawing can be made from dry materials, such as graphite or charcoal, or wet materials, such as ink or paint. was detected using infrared reflectographyinfrared reflectography (IRR): A form of infrared imaging that exploits the behavior of painting materials at wavelengths beyond those accessible to infrared photography. These advantages sometimes include a continuing increase in the transparency of pigments beyond wavelengths accessible to infrared photography (i.e, beyond 1,000 nanometers), rendering underdrawing more clearly. The resulting image is called an infrared reflectogram. Devices that came into common use in the 1980s such as the infrared vidicon effectively revealed these features but suffered from lack of sharpness and uneven response. Vidicons continue to be used out to 2,200 nanometers but several newer pixelated detectors including indium gallium arsenide and indium antimonide array detectors offer improvements. All of these devices are optimally used with filters constraining their response to those parts of the infrared spectrum that reveal the most within the constraints of the palette used for a given painting. They can be used for transmitted light imaging as well as in reflection. or examination with a stereomicroscope. The composition appears to have been exclusively painted with wet-into-wetwet-into-wet: An oil painting technique which involves blending of colors on the picture surface. and wet-over-wetwet-over-wet: An oil painting technique which involves drawing a stroke of one color across the wet paint of another color. brushwork, indicating a short period of time in its execution. The artist concentrated on the sumptuous salon interior first and later the figures. A thin greenish-blue washwash: An application of thin paint that has been diluted with solvent. was broadly applied across approximately two-thirds of the upper picture plane (Fig. 6). This initial wash established the tonal foundation of the canapé (sofa) while also remaining visible within the gilt-paneled wall, where it contributes to a subtle textural effect. The floral pattern of the canapé was rendered with fluid, modulated turquoise paint and short, curving brushstrokes, applied wet-over-wet (Fig. 7). The artist later executed the wall by applying streaky strokes of yellow-brown paint over the greenish-blue wash, and where the wash remains visible, the artist’s technique effectively suggests woodgrain (Fig. 8). With a fine brush, the simplified form of the gilded boiseries (paneling) and bronze clock were delineated with brownish ocher paint, followed by dabs and strokes to indicate shadows and reflections of light.

Fig. 7. Photomicrograph of the canapé, *A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword* (1764?)

The figures were executed using loose brushwork, with finer handling reserved for select details. The paint of the hands and faces appears to have been highly blended in comparison to the costumes. The man was softly modeled with brownish beige, light pink, and white paint, giving subtle transitions of light across the smooth, rounded face (Fig. 9). Thin, fluid brushstrokes of reddish beige, red, and brown around the eyelids, mouth, and nose lend delicacy to his facial expression. However, the extent of abrasionabrasion: A loss of surface material due to rubbing, scraping, frequent touching, or inexpert solvent cleaning. and overpaintoverpaint: Restoration paint that covers original paint that may or may not be damaged. Historically, overpaint has often been applied too broadly, altering the intended aesthetic of the painting and sometimes introducing conceptions foreign to the original artist, thereby altering our understanding of the work and the era to which it belongs. in the women’s faces limit a fuller assessment. Costumes were built up in opaque paint layers, with highlights and shadows suggested through loose, directional, sketch-like brushwork, applied wet-over-wet and wet-into-wet. Decorative elements on the gentleman’s coat, including buttons and floral embroidery (Fig. 10), were applied wet-over-wet using a very fine brush, with similar handling evident in the figures’ lace sleeves and ribbons on the floor.

Fig. 9. Photomicrograph of the man’s face, *A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword* (1764?)

No significant pentimentipentimento (pl: pentimenti): A change to the composition made by the artist that is visible on the paint surface. Often with time, pentimenti become more visible as the upper layers of paint become more transparent with age. Italian for "repentance" or "a change of mind." or compositional revisions are apparent beyond minor adjustments along the contours of individual forms. The absence of an artist underdrawing, minimal artist changes, and smaller dimensions support the view that the paintings are copies of De Troy’s original set of paintings (Figs. 1–2). Christophe Leribault identified that the Nelson-Atkins painting A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword differs slightly from the original, with the perspective of the parquet floor being less precise, the canapé more visible, and a seam omitted from the woman’s dress.³Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 335. Leribault further notes that the expanded compositional edges show more of the salon interior including the canapé and wall. This observation remains accurate despite the painting’s dimensions having been slightly enlarged during a previous lining, with the outer edges covered by up to 1 centimeter of fill and retouching (Fig. 11).⁴Forrest Bailey, treatment report, March 7, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1.

Fig 10. Photomicrograph of the man’s inner coat, *A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword* (1764?)

Although the date of the painting remains tentative, aspects of its paint handling, condition, and treatment history support the conclusion that it forms a pendant to A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor (1764?). For instance, the wood parquet is rendered in a similar manner, with a yellow base tone overlaid in certain areas with brownish-ocher wash and fluid black paint outlining the individual floorboards. Pigment analysis of the yellow and blue pigments on the man’s inner coat could provide further confirmation that the painting is an eighteenth-century copy after Jean François de Troy.⁵For information about the original pendants by De Troy, see the accompanying curatorial entry by Nicole R. Myers.

Fig. 12. Details captured during the 1982 treatment of *A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword* (1764?), showing the leftmost woman’s face before retouching (top) and after retouching (bottom)

The painting was glue-lined and attached to a six-membered stretcherstretcher: A wooden structure to which the painting’s canvas is attached. Unlike strainers, stretchers can be expanded slightly at the joints to improve canvas tension and avoid sagging due to humidity changes or aging. prior to its acquisition by the Nelson-Atkins in 1982. Earlier in its history, the canvas had been attached to an auxiliary support with a horizontal cross member, as evidenced by a pair of horizontal cracksstretcher cracks: Linear cracks or deformations in the painting’s surface that correspond to the inner edges of the underlying stretcher or strainer members. in the center of the painting. The painting shows a network of fine craquelurecraquelure: The network or pattern of cracks that develop on a paint surface as it ages. distributed across its surface. Shortly after acquisition, the painting was cleaned, retouched, and varnished.⁶Bailey, treatment report, March 7, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1. Conservator Forrest Bailey noted the extensive overpaint and paint abrasion associated with an earlier cleaning campaign, which severely impacted the figures’ faces, the man’s wig, and the box of ribbons.⁷Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1. Bailey focused on reintegrating these damages and reconstructing the faces of the lady and maid (Fig. 12).⁸The retouching of the two female heads was informed by the original De Troy painting reproduced in Pierre Verlet, French Furniture and Interior Decoration of the 18th Century (London: Charles E. Tuttle, 1967), pl. 92. See Bailey, treatment report, March 7, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1. The overall extent of the retouching, now discolored, can be clearly distinguished when the painting is examined with ultraviolet (UV) radiationultraviolet (UV) radiation: A segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond the sensitivity of the human eye, with wavelengths ranging from 100–400 nanometers. For a description of its use in the study of art objects, see ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence or UV-induced visible fluorescence. (Fig. 13).

Sophia Boosalis

May 2026

Notes

Forrest Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1.
The radiograph is a composite of three film-based radiographs, with a black area representing a region that was not captured. See film-based radiographs, no.172, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1.
Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 335.
Forrest Bailey, treatment report, March 7, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1.
For information about the original pendants by De Troy, see the accompanying curatorial entry by Nicole R. Myers.
Bailey, treatment report, March 7, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1.
Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1.
The retouching of the two female heads was informed by the original De Troy painting reproduced in Pierre Verlet, French Furniture and Interior Decoration of the 18th Century (London: Charles E. Tuttle, 1967), pl. 92. See Bailey, treatment report, March 7, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/1.

Top of section

Documentation

Citation

Chicago:

Glynnis Napier Stevenson, “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1764 (?),” documentation in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.312.4033.

MLA:

Stevenson, Glynnis Napier. “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1764 (?),” documentation. French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/78973.5.312.4033.

Provenance

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Possible sale, Versailles, ca. 1980 [1];

With Etablissement pour la diffusion et la connaissance des œuvres d’art (“D.C.”), Vaduz, Liechtenstein, by August 18–September 14, 1982;

Purchased from the latter, through David Carritt Limited, London, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1982.

Notes

[1] Former Nelson-Atkins curator Roger Ward noted in a letter to Jessica Falvo, student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, November 27, 1995, that the painting might have been auctioned at a Versailles sale in 1980. Extensive research has not produced any record of the paintings before 1982.

Related Works

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1734, oil on canvas, 31 9/16 x 25 1/8 in. (81 x 64 cm), private collection.

Drawn copy, black pencil, sanguine, watercolor, and gouache, 20 1/2 x 16 1/16 in. (52.8 x 41 cm), location unknown, cited in Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 335.

Pendants

Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1734, oil on canvas, 31 9/16 x 25 1/8 in. (81 x 64 cm), private collection.

After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?), oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 18 in. (64.8 x 45.7 cm), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 82-36/2.

Top of section

Exhibitions

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Genre, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 5–May 15, 1983, no. 16A, as by Jean-François De Troy, Scenes Gallantes: A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword.

References

references

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Roger Ward, “New at the Nelson: Two Detroy [sic] Paintings Added to Collection,” Calendar of Events (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) (April 1983): 2, (repro.), as by Jean François Detroy [sic], A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword.

Donald Hoffmann, “Art journal: This preservation exhibit is better late,” Kansas City Star 103, no. 292 (August 28, 1983): 8E.

Ross E. Taggart and Laurence Sickman, Genre, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1983), 2, 12, (repro.), as by Jean François Detroy [sic], Scenes Gallantes: A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword.

“Principales acquisitions des musées en 1983,” La Chronique des Arts: supplément à la Gazette des Beaux-Arts 103, no. 1382 (March 1984): S27, (repro.), as by J.-F. de Troy, Jeune femme attachant un ruban à l’épée d’un jeune homme.

Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 108–09, (repro.), as by Jean-François de Troy, Fixing the bow, France.

Peter Thornton, “Regards d’époque,” Connaissance des Arts, no. 405 (November 1985): 78, (repro.), as by J.-F. de Troye [sic], Le nœud.

GBL: 1986 Annual Report (Brussels: Groupe Bruxelles Lambert s.a., 1986), 8, (repro.), as by Jean-François de Troy, Scène galante.

Roger Ward, ed., A Bountiful Decade: Selected Acquisitions, 1977–1987, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1987), 124, as by Jean-François de Troy, A lady attaching a bow to a gentleman’s sword.

Elise Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette,” Simiolus 17, no. 1 (1987): 55n70, as by Jean-François de Troy, A lady attaching a bow to a gentleman’s sword.

Jean-Luc Bordeaux, “Jean-François de Troy, Still an Enigma: Some Observations on His Early Works,” Artibus et Historiae 10, no. 20 (1989): 169n28.

Jacques Anquetil, La Soie en Occident (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 98–99, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Une dame attachant un nœud à l’épée d’un gentilhomme.

Katharina Krause, “Genrebilder: Mode und Gesellschaft der Aristokraten bei Jean-François de Troy,” Festschrift für Johannes Langner zum 65. Geburtstag am 1. Februar 1997, ed. Klaus Gereon Beuckers and Annemarie Jaeggi (Munich: Lit, 1997), 146–48, 156n41, 160, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Une dame attachant un nœud à l’épée d’un cavalier.

Richard Rand, Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, exh. cat. (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1997), 108n2.

Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), no. P. 222 b, p. 335, (repro.), as Dame attachant un nœud à l’épée d’un cavalier.

Colin B. Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W Gaehtgens, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, ed. Colin Bailey, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 39n243.

Denise Amy Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability in Jean-François de Troy’s tableaux de mode, 1725–1738” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2003), 267–68, as by Jean François de Troy, Dame attachant un nœud à l’épée d’un cavalier.

Alden Cavanaugh, ed., Performing the “Everyday”: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware, 2007), 31, 35, 40, 43n16, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword.

Denise Amy Baxter, “Parvenu or honnête homme: The Collecting Practices of Germain-Louis de Chauvelin,” Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (2008): 280, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword.

Charissa Bremer-David, ed., Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011), 25, as by Jean François de Troy, A Lady Fastening a Ribbon on a Sword.

Een leven in Mode: Vrouwenkleding 1750–1950, Uit de collective Jacoba de Jonge/ Living Fashion: Women’s Daily Wear, 1750–1950, From the Jacoba de Jonge Collection, exh. cat. (Tielt, Belgium: Lannoo, 2012), 60, 62, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, The Ribbon.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 66, (repro.), as after Jean François de Troy, Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword.

Top of section

After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?)

Technical Entry

conservation2

Citation

Chicago:

Sophia Boosalis, “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?),” technical entry in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2026), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.313.2088.

MLA:

Boosalis, Sophia. “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?),” technical entry. French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2026. doi: 10.37764/78973.5.313.2088.

A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor was executed on a fine, plain-weaveplain weave: A basic textile weave in which one weft thread alternates over and under the warp threads. Often this structure consists of one thread in each direction, but threads can be doubled (basket weave) or tripled to create more complex plain weave. Plain weave is sometimes called tabby weave. canvas with numerous slubs.¹Forrest Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2. Little information is known about the original canvas as its tacking marginstacking margins: The outer edges of canvas that wrap around and are attached to the stretcher or strainer with tacks or staples. See also tacking edge. were removed during a previous lininglining: A procedure used to reinforce a weakened canvas that involves adhering a second fabric support using adhesive, most often a glue-paste mixture, wax, or synthetic adhesive., and the outer edges are now covered by fillfill material: A material added to a loss of paint and/or ground to create an area level with the surrounding original paint. and retouchingretouching: Paint application by a conservator or restorer to cover losses and unify the original composition. Retouching is an aspect of conservation treatment that is aesthetic in nature and that differs from more limited procedures undertaken solely to stabilize original material. Sometimes referred to as inpainting or retouch.. X-radiographyX-ray radiography (also referred to as x-radiography or radiography): Radiography is an examination tool analogous to the use of X-rays in medicine whereby denser components of a painted composition can be recorded as an inverted shadow image cast on film or a digital X-ray imaging plate from a source such as an X-ray tube. The method has been used for more than a century and is most effective with dense pigments incorporating metallic elements such as lead or zinc. It can reveal artist changes, underlying compositions, and information concerning the artwork’s construction and condition. The resulting image is called an x-radiograph or radiograph. It differs from the uses of X-ray spectrometry in being dependent on the density of the paint to absorb X-rays before they reach the film or image plate and being non-specific as to which elements are responsible for the resulting shadow image. confirms that the original canvas does not extend to the painting’s current outer edges (Fig. 14);²The radiograph is a composite of two film-based radiographs, with black areas representing regions that were not captured. See film-based radiographs, no. 173, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2. a similar treatment was performed on A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword (F82-36/1). However, strong cuspingcusping: A scalloped pattern along the canvas edges that relates to how the canvas was stretched. Primary cusping reveals where tacks secured the canvas to the support while the ground layer was applied. Secondary cusping can form when a pre-primed canvas is re-stretched by the artist prior to painting. visible along all four edges indicates that the composition is close to its original dimensions. The canvas was prepared with a thickly applied, light-gray groundground layer: An opaque preparatory layer applied to the support, either commercially or by the artist, to prevent absorption of the paint into the canvas or panel. See also priming layer..

Fig. 14. Radiograph of *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor* (1764?)

No underdrawingunderdrawing: A drawn or painted sketch beneath the paint layer. The underdrawing can be made from dry materials, such as graphite or charcoal, or wet materials, such as ink or paint. was detected using infrared reflectographyinfrared reflectography (IRR): A form of infrared imaging that exploits the behavior of painting materials at wavelengths beyond those accessible to infrared photography. These advantages sometimes include a continuing increase in the transparency of pigments beyond wavelengths accessible to infrared photography (i.e, beyond 1,000 nanometers), rendering underdrawing more clearly. The resulting image is called an infrared reflectogram. Devices that came into common use in the 1980s such as the infrared vidicon effectively revealed these features but suffered from lack of sharpness and uneven response. Vidicons continue to be used out to 2,200 nanometers but several newer pixelated detectors including indium gallium arsenide and indium antimonide array detectors offer improvements. All of these devices are optimally used with filters constraining their response to those parts of the infrared spectrum that reveal the most within the constraints of the palette used for a given painting. They can be used for transmitted light imaging as well as in reflection. or stereomicroscopic examination. The artist executed the composition over a short period of time as evident by the extensive wet-over-wetwet-over-wet: An oil painting technique which involves drawing a stroke of one color across the wet paint of another color. brushwork. Compositional elements appear to have been laid in with initial washeswash: An application of thin paint that has been diluted with solvent., such as the red wash beneath the vanity and the brown wash in the curtains. The artist established the salon interior first and left reservesreserve: An area of the composition left unpainted with the intention of inserting a feature at a later stage in the painting process. for the central figures.

The back wall was constructed with a modulating brownish-gray tone over which the gilded boiseries (paneling) were blocked in with ocher, yellow, and brown paint. Dark washes were subsequently applied to define shadows and spatial depth. Although abrasionabrasion: A loss of surface material due to rubbing, scraping, frequent touching, or inexpert solvent cleaning. limits a more detailed analysis, the gilded surfaces throughout the composition appear to follow a similar approach. The green curtain was painted over a brown wash that remains visible as a warm midtone within the folds. Above the green washes, loose zigzagging strokes of lighter green paint create highlights and a satin-like reflectance.

Fig. 15. Photomicrograph of the vanity table, *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor* (1764?)

In the execution of the vanity table, the artist underpaintedunderpainting: The first applications of paint that begin to block in color and loosely define the compositional elements. Also called ébauche. the area with a red wash. Thin, scumblescumble: A thin layer of opaque or semi-opaque paint that partially covers and modifies the underlying paint.-like applications of gray and white establish the vertical folds of the tablecloth followed by fine strokes to produce the floral motifs. Paint abrasion has made this red underlayer visibly prominent, disrupting the sense of transparency that the artist had generated in the thin white fabric (Fig. 15). The objects arranged on the vanity were executed rapidly with wet-over-wet handling, while dabs of white paint were applied to suggest reflected light across the metallic surfaces (Fig. 16).

Fig. 16. Photomicrograph of the items on the vanity table, *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor* (1764?)

The sequence of execution suggests that the man and maid were painted before the central female figure, whose dress overlaps adjacent forms. Costumes were generally established with a flat base tone, followed by wet-over-wet brushwork to define folds and decorative details. For instance, the aristocratic woman’s red dress consists of a pinkish-orange tone with sketchy horizonal strokes of dark-brown wash to suggest shadows and folds and brighter reddish-orange strokes for highlights. The decorative motif running down the center of the dress was executed with fine dabs of paint. Similarly, the man’s coat consists of a gray wash, lighter highlights, and brown shadows, with the gold embellishments formed through strokes and dabs of ocher, yellow, and white paint. The maid’s apron was rendered with vertical and zigzagging brushstrokes, while her sleeves and dress display a floral pattern with more delicate, finely painted details.

The figures’ faces were constructed with a light pinkish-beige tone, traces of which remain visible beneath abraded brown shadows in the man’s partially shaded face (Fig. 17). Pink tones model rosy complexions, while reddish-brown paint defines warm shadows along the contours of the faces. Pink accents and dark brown linear strokes outline the nose, eyes, lips, and eyebrows (Fig. 18), followed by touches of white, pink, and sometimes yellow for highlights. By comparison, the hands were executed more rapidly, often leaving the ground exposed beneath the streaky applications of pink, beige, and brown.

Fig. 17. Photomicrograph of the man’s face, *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor* (1764?)

No pentimentipentimento (pl: pentimenti): A change to the composition made by the artist that is visible on the paint surface. Often with time, pentimenti become more visible as the upper layers of paint become more transparent with age. Italian for "repentance" or "a change of mind." or compositional changes are apparent beyond minor adjustments along the contours of individual forms. Christophe Leribault identified that the Nelson-Atkins version differs slightly from the original, including a lack of finish in the parquet floor and the expanded composition along the painting’s edges.³Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 334. These differences remain evident despite the painting’s dimensions having been slightly enlarged during a previous lining, with approximately 3/5 centimeters of fill and retouching added along the outer edges (Fig. 19).⁴Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2. Leribault further notes a drier paint handling, although this observation may result from the extensive abrasion caused by past cleaning campaigns.⁵Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752), 334.

Fig. 19. Photograph captured during the 1982 treatment of *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor* (1764?), taken before retouching

The likely execution date, located on the left side of the crumpled letter on the parquet floor, appears to be “1764” (Fig. 20), which is later than the year of De Troy’s death. The date was painted wet-over-wet into the white paint and appears to be contemporary to the composition. Additional paint strokes on the letter may represent a decorative text or a signature, though the letter is heavily abraded.⁶In the original pair, A Lady at Her Toilette bears the signature “De Troy” on the letter in the lower right; see the accompanying curatorial entry by Nicole R. Myers. The artist of the Nelson-Atkins paintings may similarly have inscribed their own name in this location. The dated inscription supports the conclusion that the work is a posthumous copy after De Troy, together with the absence of an underdrawing, minimal pentimenti, and smaller dimensions.⁷See the accompanying curatorial entry by Myers.

Fig. 21. Photograph captured during the 1982 treatment of *A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor* (1764?), taken before retouching (left) and after retouching (right)

The painting has a similar condition and treatment history as A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword. Prior to its acquisition by the Nelson-Atkins in 1982, the painting was glue-lined and attached to a six-membered stretcherstretcher: A wooden structure to which the painting’s canvas is attached. Unlike strainers, stretchers can be expanded slightly at the joints to improve canvas tension and avoid sagging due to humidity changes or aging.. The painting has a network of cracksage cracks: The formation of cracks that occur due to a loss of elasticity in the paint film and priming as these materials age, combined with responses to environmental changes (i.e. expansion and contraction of the support). distributed across its surface, along with horizontal stretcher cracksstretcher cracks: Linear cracks or deformations in the painting’s surface that correspond to the inner edges of the underlying stretcher or strainer members. from a previous auxiliary support. In 1983, the painting was cleaned, retouched, and coated with a blend of synthetic varnishes.⁸Forrest Bailey, treatment report, January 27, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2. Conservator Forrest Bailey noted that the delicate, translucent passages had been abraded from previous cleaning campaigns, along with the letter and all three heads (Fig. 21).⁹Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2. The extent of the retouching campaign can be clearly distinguished when the painting is examined with ultraviolet (UV) radiationultraviolet (UV) radiation: A segment of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond the sensitivity of the human eye, with wavelengths ranging from 100–400 nanometers. For a description of its use in the study of art objects, see ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence or UV-induced visible fluorescence. (Fig. 22). There remain residues of an old natural-resin varnish trapped in the shallow impastoimpasto: A thick application of paint, often creating texture such as peaks and ridges., providing a brownish tint to the white passages, such as in the aristocratic woman’s dress.

Sophia Boosalis

May 2026

Notes

Forrest Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2.
The radiograph is a composite of two film-based radiographs, with black areas representing regions that were not captured. See film-based radiographs, no. 173, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2.
Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), 334.
Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2.
Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752), 334.
In the original pair, A Lady at Her Toilette bears the signature “De Troy” on the letter in the lower right; see the accompanying curatorial entry by Nicole R. Myers. The artist of the Nelson-Atkins paintings may similarly have inscribed their own name in this location.
See the accompanying curatorial entry by Myers.
Forrest Bailey, treatment report, January 27, 1983, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2.
Bailey, examination report, December 17, 1982, NAMA conservation file, 82-36/2.

Top of section

Documentation

Citation

Chicago:

Glynnis Napier Stevenson, “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?),” documentation in French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/78973.5.313.4033.

MLA:

Stevenson, Glynnis Napier. “After Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1764 (?),” documentation. French Paintings and Pastels, 1600–1945: The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/78973.5.313.4033.

Provenance

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Possible sale, Versailles, ca. 1980 [1];

With Etablissement pour la diffusion et la connaissance des œuvres d’art (“D.C.”), Vaduz, Liechenstein, by August 18–September 14, 1982;

Purchased from Etablissement “D.C.”, through David Carritt Limited, London, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1982.

Notes

[1] Former Nelson-Atkins curator Roger Ward noted in a letter to Jessica Falvo, student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, November 27, 1995, that the painting might have been auctioned at a Versailles sale in 1980. See letter in NAMA curatorial file. Extensive research has not produced any record of the paintings before 1982.

Related Works

related2

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor, 1734, oil on canvas, 31 9/16 x 25 1/8 in. (81 x 64 cm), private collection.

Pendant

Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1734, oil on canvas, 31 9/16 x 25 1/8 in. (81 x 64 cm), private collection.

After to Jean François de Troy, A Lady Attaching a Bow to a Gentleman’s Sword, 1764 (?), oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 18 in. (65.1 x 45.7 cm), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 82-36/1.

Top of section

Exhibitions

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Genre, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 5–May 15, 1983, no. 16B, as by Jean François De Troy, Scenes Gallantes: A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to her Suitor.

A Bountiful Decade: Selected Acquisitions 1977–1987, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, October 14–December 6, 1987, no. 52, as by Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to her Suitor.

References

references2

Citation

Chicago:

MLA:

Donald Hoffmann, “Art journal: This preservation exhibit is better late,” Kansas City Star 103, no. 292 (August 28, 1983): 8E.

Ross E. Taggart and Laurence Sickman, Genre, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1983), 12, as by Jean François Detroy [sic], Scenes Gallantes: A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to her Suitor.

New Criterion 3 (1984): 86, as by Jean François De Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to her Suitor.

“Principales acquisitions des musées en 1983,” La Chronique des Arts: supplément à la Gazette des Beaux-Arts 103, no. 1382 (March 1984): S27, as by J. F. de Troy, Jeune femme montrant un bracelet miniature à son suivant.

Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 108–09, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, At the dressing-table, France.

Elise Goodman-Soellner, “Boucher’s Madame de Pompadour at Her Toilette,” Simiolus 17, no. 1 (1987): 55–57, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, A young woman showing a bracelet miniature to her suitor.

Roger Ward, ed., A Bountiful Decade: Selected Acquisitions, 1977–1987, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1987), 124–25, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to her Suitor.

Jean-Luc Bordeaux, “Jean François de Troy, Still an Enigma: Some Observations on His Early Works,” Artibus et Historiae 10, no. 20 (1989): 169n28, as by Jean François de Troy, The Bracelet.

Alison J. Carter, Underwear: The Fashion History (London: B. T. Batsford, 1992), 27, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, At the Dressing Table.

Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, Classic Fabrics (London: Collins and Brown, 1996), 21, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy.

Patricia Wardle and I. C. Grunnill, “Een toilet kleed met kant: Kanttekeningen bij de textilia voor de toilettafel in de late zeventiende en achttiende eeuw,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 44, no. 1 (1996): 28, 35n10, as by Jean François de Troy.

Klaus G. Beuckers and Annemarie Jaeggi, eds., Festschrift für Johannes Langner zum 65. Geburtstag am 1. Februar 1997 (Munich: Lit, 1997), 146–48, 156n41, 160–61, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Une dame qui donne don portrait à un jeune homme.

Richard Rand, Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, exh. cat. (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1997), 108n2, as by Jean François de Troy.

Jan Walgrave, Het Labo van de Verleiding: Geschiedenis van de Make-up / The Laboratory of Seduction: History of Make-Up, exh. cat. (Antwerp: Koningin Fabiolazaal, 1998), 158, 179, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Dame en haar bezoeker.

Important mobilier, important orfèvrerie (Monte-Carlo, Monaco: Sotheby’s, December 11, 1999), 28–29, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Femme à sa toilette.

Melissa Hyde, “The ‘Makeup’ of the Marquise: Boucher’s Portrait of Pompadour at Her Toilette,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 466, 470, (repro.), as by François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Miniature Bracelet to Her Suitor.

Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University, 2001), 18–19, (repro.), as by Jean François Detroy [sic], A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor.

Monique Crick, “Regard sur la céramique chinoise dans quelques peintures françaises des XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles,” Cahiers de la Compagnie des Indes, no. 7/8 (2002–2003): 40, 42, (repro.), as A la table de toilette.

Christophe Leribault, Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 2002), no. P. 221 b, p. 334, (repro.), as Dame à sa toilette recevant un cavalier.

Colin B. Bailey, Philip Conisbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University, 2003), 39n243.

Denise Amy Baxter, “Fashions of Sociability in Jean François de Troy’s Tableaux de Mode, 1725–1738” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2003), 267–68, as by Jean François de Troy, Dame à sa toilette recevant un cavalier.

Watteau et la fête galante, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2004), 35, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Dame à sa toilette recevant un cavalier.

Yves Carlier, “Details of the Toilet Service of the Duchesse de Cadaval,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 78, no. 1/2 (2004): 5, 7, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor.

Melissa Hyde, Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and His Critics (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 120–21, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor.

Alden Cavanaugh, ed., Performing the “Everyday”: The Culture of Genre in The Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware, 2007), 28, 31, 34, 40, 43n16, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Lady at Her Toilette Receiving a Gentleman.

Kristel Smentek, Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East, exh. cat. (New York: Frick Collection, 2007), 33n21, as by Jean François de Troy, At the Toilette.

Monika Kopplin, European Lacquer: Selected Works from the Museum Für Lackkunst Münster (Munich: Hirmer, 2010), 110, 113, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, Dame à sa toilette reçevant un cavalier.

Charissa Bremer-David, ed., Paris: Life and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 56–59, 68, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet to her Suitor.

Paula Phipps, Mirrors Reflections of Style (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 20, (repro.), as by Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor.

Paula Radisich, Pastiche, Fashion, and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects: Looking Smart (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 92, (repro.), as attributed to Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor.

Paul Micio, Les Collections de Monsieur frère de Louis XIV: Orfèvrerie et objets d’art des Orléans sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art, 2014), 252–53, (repro.), as Dame à sa toilette recevant un cavalier.

Être et paraître: La vie aristocratique au XVIII^e siècle; Trésors caches du musée national de la Renaissance, exh. cat. (Paris: ArtLys, 2015), 22, 25, (repro.), as La Table de toilette.

Martine Gauvard, Gérard Picaud, and Jean Foisselon, Fils de lin, lumière de l’autre: modes et dentelles à la Visitation (Paris: Somogy Editions d’Art, 2017), 146, (repro.), as by Follower of Jean François de Troy, Une femme montrant son bracelet à son prétendant.

The Exceptional Sale: Le regard d’Elie Top (Paris: Christie’s, November 27, 2019), 59, as attributed to Jean François de Troy, Dame à sa toilette recevant un cavalier.

Margherita Rosina and Enrica Morini, Moda del Settecento a Palazzo Morando: La donazione di Amichæ, exh. cat. (Milan: Cinisello Balsamo, 2020), 74–75, (repro.), as a copy by (?) Jean François de Troy, Dama che mostra una miniatura del braccialetto al suo corteggiatore.

Janet Arnold et al., Patterns of Fashion 6: The Content, Cut, Construction, and Context of European Women’s Dress ca. 1695–1795, ed. Jenny Tiramani (London: School of Historical Dress, 2021), 26, (repro.), as after J.-F. de Troy, A Lady and Her Suitor.

Maroma Camilleri and Maverick Spiteri, eds., Power, Costume, and Scenography: Making Fashion a Statement in 18th and 19th Century Malta; Proceedings of the Public Lectures Series 2019–2020 held at the National Library of Malta, Valletta (Valletta: Malta Libraries, 2022), 17–18, 20, (repro.), as by Unknown artist, after Jean François de Troy, A Lady Showing a Bracelet Miniature to Her Suitor.

Christophe Huchet de Quénetain, Nicolas Besnier (1685/86–1754): architecte, orfèvre du roi, et échevin de la ville de Paris (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2023).

Sarah Kilby and Clare Murphy, eds., Crown to Couture: The Magazine; Fashion, Style, and Celebrity from the Georgian Court and the Red Carpet (London: Historic Royal Palaces, 2023), 72, (repro.).

Thierry Franz, Paraître. Beauté(s) en Representation XVIIIème–XXIème siècles, exh. cat. (Lunéville, France: Château de Lunéville, forthcoming 2024), 7, (repro.).

Top of section