Alexis Grimou

Alexis Grimou liked to paint himself with a glass in his hand. In his 'Self-Portrait as a Drinker,' now in Edinburgh, he leans out toward the viewer in fancy dress, wine raised in one hand and a carafe in the other, half performer and half provocation.

Born in Argenteuil near Paris in 1678, Grimou trained probably under the portraitist François de Troy, but his real teachers were the Dutch and Flemish masters he studied, above all Rembrandt, whose warm shadows and thick handling he borrowed so openly that the French came to call him their own Rembrandt. Rather than the official Académie Royale, he belonged to the Académie de Saint-Luc, the older painters' guild, and made his living from portraits.

His speciality was the tête de fantaisie, a head-and-shoulders figure in costume, often modelled on himself and painted for its mood rather than any real sitter. Those informal, theatrical faces fed directly into the next generation: Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste Greuze both drew on them. Grimou died in Paris in 1733.