Portrait of the Poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

The catalogue names the sitter as the poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, though that identification has never been settled. An almost identical version hangs in London, where the man has also been proposed as the painter Jean-Baptiste Forest, and Rousseau himself wrote in 1716 that he was about to be painted for the first time in his life, which fits a portrait of 1710 poorly. If the poet's name is the right one, the date on the back catches him at his peak. That year he put himself forward for the Académie française, the summit of French letters. What came next was ruin. In 1712 he was condemned to perpetual exile over a set of malicious verses he swore he never wrote, and he spent his last 29 years wandering Europe, dying poor in Brussels. Largillière gives none of that away here, only the steady confidence of a man who still had everything ahead of him.