François Armand de Gontaut, Duc de Biron

In 1713, at the siege of Landau on the Rhine, the French general Charles-Armand de Gontaut-Biron lost an arm. He had fought through the long War of the Spanish Succession, and so had his eldest surviving son, François-Armand. In 1714, as that war came to an end, Largillière painted the son, then about 24, as a soldier.

He stands in armour with a leopard skin thrown over it as a cape, gloves in his hand, in front of a soft landscape. By then plate armour had little place on a real battlefield, and the pose itself comes from the portraits of the previous century. The museum points instead to what Largillière did with it, the plush fur, the loose curls, the smooth leather of the gloves and the tinted glints on the metal.

The young man married the following year, served as a cavalry commander and later bore the title Duke of Biron. He died in 1736, long before his one-armed father. On the back of the original canvas the painter wrote his name and the year 1714, and the picture may have come down through the sitter's youngest sister, Charlotte, who married the Marquis de Sourches.