Charles-André van Loo

In the France of Louis XV, no painter was more admired than Carle van Loo. He belonged to a whole dynasty of painters of Dutch descent and became the most famous of them all, rising to Premier Peintre du Roi, First Painter to the King, in 1762 and director of the Royal Academy the year after.

He worked in the Rococo taste of the court, light and graceful, painting religious scenes, mythologies, and portraits that sold across Europe. His standing was such that in France 'a van Loo' became a way of praising a picture as superbly done. He also ran the royal school that trained the Academy's prize-winning students, shaping the next generation of French painters.

Taste later turned against the Rococo, and his fame faded with it, so he is far less known now than in his own day. He died in Paris in 1765, and his large canvases still hang in the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires there, where he painted a celebrated cycle on the life of Saint Augustine.