Count Philipp Ludwig Wenzel Sinzendorf

In June 1728 envoys from across Europe gathered at Soissons, north-east of Paris, for a peace congress. One question on the table was the Ostend Company, a trading company in the Austrian Netherlands that Emperor Charles VI had chartered for voyages to India and China, and which Britain and the Dutch Republic wanted shut down. The emperor's man at Soissons was Count Philipp Ludwig Wenzel Sinzendorf, his court chancellor since 1705, and while he was in France he sat to Rigaud.

He wears the robes of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Habsburgs' highest order of knighthood, with its collar of gold links and the small hanging fleece on his chest. The company he was defending did not last, and Charles VI abolished it in 1731. The portrait came to the museum in 1948 as a gift from Baroness Clarisse de Rothschild, was restituted to the Rothschild family in 1999, and was given back that same year by Bettina Looram Rothschild.