Marie Serre, the Artist's Mother

At the end of 1695 Rigaud, by then one of the busiest portraitists in Paris, set his work aside and travelled south to Perpignan, near the Spanish border, where his mother Marie Serre still lived. He had a plan for the trip. He wanted a marble bust of her carved by his friend Antoine Coysevox, one of the leading sculptors in France, and the sculptor was in Paris. So Rigaud carried her face back to him in paint, and this canvas shows her twice, in profile and turned three-quarters, the views a sculptor needs to work from. He painted her from the front as well, in a separate oval portrait that is now in a château in Normandy.

Rigaud told the whole story himself, in the account of his life he later dictated to a friend. He kept this canvas in his own rooms and meant to leave it to the Royal Academy, though in the end he bequeathed it to Louis XV. Coysevox's marble bust did go to the Academy, and it is in the Louvre today as well.