Louis XV as a Young Man

Rosalba Carriera came to Paris from Venice in 1720, and by June she was drawing the king. Louis XV was ten, an orphan who had inherited the throne at five, while a regent governed France in his name. Her diary follows the commission step by step. In October she talked over her fee with the boy's governor, the maréchal de Villeroy, and on 29 December the finished pastel was delivered and hung in the king's playroom at the Tuileries palace. That sheet is now in Dresden. The Boston pastel repeats the same likeness, the long curled wig, the lace at the throat, the blue sash and star of the Order of the Holy Spirit, the order the French king led. Whose hand made it is an open question. One catalogue of her work accepts it as hers, another sees her studio sharing the work, and the standard dictionary of early pastel artists lists it as a copy. In 1937 it was sold in Paris to Forsyth Wickes, an American lawyer who collected French 18th-century art, and it reached Boston with his bequest.