Portrait of the Marquis de Marigny and His Wife

At the Salon of 1769, the official ultimately in charge of the exhibition was also hanging in it. Abel-François Poisson, marquis de Marigny, was the younger brother of Madame de Pompadour, the late favourite of Louis XV, and since 1751 he had run the king's buildings, the office that oversaw the royal palaces, the academies of art and so the Salon itself. Van Loo paints him in a red coat with the star of the Order of the Holy Spirit, leaning on a cane beside his wife, Julie Filleul, who sits at her dressing table with her reflection in the mirror behind her. They had married in 1767, when he was nearly 40 and she was 24 years younger. The marriage did not last. In 1777 she obtained a legal separation of their property, and after his death she married again. The painting seems to have stayed on her side of the family and reached her nephew, Charles de Flahaut, a general of Napoleon who went into exile in Britain after the fall of the Empire and married there. It ended up at Meikleour House, his descendants' estate in Scotland, was sold in London in 1951, and in 1994 the Société des Amis du Louvre, the museum's friends' society, bought it at auction and gave it to the Louvre.