A Magistrate

In April 1902 the pictures of Count Léon Mniszech, who had died the year before, were auctioned at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. The Mniszechs were Polish landowners from Wiśniowiec, today Vyshnivets in western Ukraine, who had settled in Paris, and the count's father, in debt, had bought his pictures in his wife's name. This portrait was lot 73. How it entered the family is less certain, and the museum records that part with a possibly.

After the sale it moved fast. Charles Fairfax Murray, an English painter who had turned dealer, bought it and within a week sold it to the London firm of Agnew, and by June it belonged to Washington Butcher Thomas of Boston. His daughter Margaret and her husband William Tudor Gardiner, governor of Maine from 1929 to 1933, gave it to the museum in 1950.

Who the sitter was is not recorded. The black robe and white bands mark a man of the law, and in Rigaud's Paris the judges of the high courts, the so-called nobility of the robe, were among his sitters.