Pierre Gobert

The great ladies of Louis XIV's court had a favourite portraitist, and he gave them all much the same thing: a half-turned pose, soft light on the shoulders, and a costume borrowed from mythology, roses and loose drapery for Flora, a bow for Diana. Pierre Gobert was born at Fontainebleau in 1662, the son of a sculptor who worked for the crown, and he was received into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture on the last day of 1701, as a portraitist.

The formula travelled. He worked for the ducal court of Lorraine at Lunéville, where Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, a niece of Louis XIV, was duchess, and he went on painting royal sitters into the reign of Louis XV. He also worked fast and with assistants, which has left his cataloguers a problem. Versions, repetitions and studio copies carry his name across European collections, and separating his own hand from his workshop's is often impossible.

The Pitti's picture shows how careful that makes a museum. Its record calls the painting attributed to Gobert, dates it only to about 1710 to 1730, and leaves the girl dressed as Flora anonymous. French, the museum argues, from her classical dress and from the sheet of water behind her, which resembles the water parterre at Versailles.