Family Portrait

For a long time this canvas was called The Painter, His Wife and His Daughter, and older books still date it around 1710 and take the seated man for Largillière himself. The Louvre no longer accepts that. Its label keeps the old title only to say it was wrong, places the picture between about 1720 and 1730, and gives the sitters no names at all.

What remains is a prosperous family sitting out of doors under the trees. The man in the great curled wig has a hunting gun tucked under his arm, his dog's head beside his knee and a dead bird at his feet. A young woman stands behind him holding a sheet of music and turns her hand towards him, while an older woman in red silk sits on the right.

The collector Louis La Caze, a Paris doctor, owned the picture by 1860 and left it to the Louvre in 1869. It hangs today in the room given over to Watteau.