Jacques Laumosnier

In June 1660, on Pheasant Island in the Bidasoa, the river on the border between France and Spain, the young Louis XIV met his uncle Philip IV of Spain to seal the peace between their kingdoms and his marriage to the Infanta Maria Theresa. Jacques Laumosnier's painting of that meeting, now in the Musée de Tessé in Le Mans, was made decades later as a reduced version of a design for the royal Gobelins tapestries.

Laumosnier was born in Paris around 1669 and probably trained at the Gobelins workshops, where he learned history painting. He became a master painter in 1693. The meeting and the royal wedding that followed are the first paintings known by him, both made for Marshal René de Froulay, Count of Tessé, a soldier and diplomat who went on to order nine large canvases of events in his own career. From 1718 Laumosnier styled himself painter to the king. After Tessé died in 1725 he painted portraits for aristocrats and merchants, and he is last recorded in 1744, by then over 75.