Unknown, Portrait of Marie Louis Charles Vassinhac d’Imécourt, vicomte d’Imécourt, ca. 1780

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Unknown, Portrait of Marie Louis Charles Vassinhac d’Imécourt, vicomte d’Imécourt, ca. 1780,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.2240.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Unknown, Portrait of Marie Louis Charles Vassinhac d’Imécourt, vicomte d’Imécourt, ca. 1780,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.2240.

Long attributed to the Swedish miniaturist Pierre Adolphe Hall, this miniature has since been reassigned to an unknown artist of the French school due to the lack of similarity to Hall’s style and technique.¹ The sitter, too, was long thought to be a Monsieur d’Imécaux, based presumably on a misreading of the inscription, but can now be identified confidently as Marie Louis Charles Vassinhac d’Imécourt, vicomte d’Imécourt.² Born in 1747 at the Hôtel de Créquy in Paris, which was built by Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708) in 1708 for his mother’s family, Imécourt may have been painted just before his untimely death at the age of thirty-nine on March 3, 1786, also at the Hôtel de Créquy. Having joined the royal cavalry at sixteen, d’Imécourt was appointed First Lieutenant to the elite unit, the Gendarmes de la Reine, became a colonel in 1776, and was honored as a knight of the chivalric order of Saint Louis.³

It is possible that the miniature commemorated Imécourt’s marriage on June 1, 1778, to Charlotte Ferdinande de Chauvelin, daughter of the marquis de Chauvelin and lady-in-waiting to Madame Élisabeth of France, the youngest sister of King Louis XVI. Both d’Imécourt and his bride were closely connected to the royal family; d’Imécourt himself was in the household of the comte d’Artois, the king’s youngest brother. Monsieur d’Imécourt is finely dressed in a green coat adorned with elaborate gold embroidery, frogging, and rosette buttons, along with a matching gold waistcoat peeking out from behind his sheer lace cravat. His age is difficult to determine with any precision due to his relatively generous, though fashionable, use of cosmetics. The artist has applied heavy amounts of what appears to be a red lake pigment to d’Imécourt’s cheeks and lips to approximate the appearance of rouge.⁴ His pale skin may also have been achieved with a white base to assume a modishly pale complexion. Likewise, his hair is covered with a heavy dusting of white powder, though his natural brown hair color peeks through in certain areas, particularly behind the ears.

Monsieur d’Imécourt regards the viewer with a cool, perhaps even supercilious gaze, dressed and painted in the height of Parisian fashion. The painted surface throughout utilizes gouache for opacity, as was preferred by French artists in contrast to the light, translucent colors fashionable in England in the 1780s. Likewise, this miniature’s round, rather than oval, format was customary in France at the time. While the artist remains unknown, he or she was attuned to the taste of French aristocratic patrons in the 1770s and 1780s.

Notes

1. We are grateful to Bernd Pappe for sharing his insight on the miniature’s attribution and the sitter’s identity during a visit to the Nelson-Atkins, July 24–26, 2023. Notes in NAMA curatorial files.

2. With appreciation to NAMA volunteer Karen Pearson for her support with the genealogy research for this miniature.

3. Jean-Baptiste Pierre Jullien de Courcelles, Histoire Généalogique et Héraldique des Pairs de France (Paris: Jullien de Courcelles et Arthus Bertrand, 1828), 9:40.

4. Pappe, 2023, notes in NAMA curatorial files.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 264.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 250, p. 81, (repro.), as by Pierre Adolphe Hall, Unknown Man.

Nathalie Lemoine-Bouchard, Les Peintres en Miniature 1650–1850 (Paris: Les éditions de l’Amateur, 2008), 278.