Portrait of Denis Diderot

In 1767 Denis Diderot was in his early fifties and had just finished the Encyclopédie, the vast reference work he had edited for some 20 years through two official bans. That year his friend Louis-Michel van Loo painted him at his desk, pen in hand, in a loose blue silk gown with lace at the cuffs, looking up and away from the page. The portrait was shown at the Salon of 1767, which the philosopher was reviewing for a handwritten newsletter sent to subscribers at foreign courts, so the sitter ended up writing about his own likeness, fond of the painter and doubtful about the resemblance. Van Loo gave him the canvas. It passed down through the family of his daughter Angélique, whose descendants gave it to the Louvre in 1911. It hangs in a room the museum devotes to Diderot's painters.