Presumed Portrait of Chevalier de Damery

The cross pinned to this man's coat is the badge of the Order of Saint Louis, which the French crown gave to army officers for long service. Nobody wrote his name on the canvas. When it was sold in Paris in 1866 it was simply a portrait of a great lord, and in 1904 a portrait of a knight of Saint Louis. The name the Museum of Fine Arts now gives it, with a careful presumed, is the Chevalier de Damery, an officer in the French Guards and one of Greuze's close friends and patrons. Damery collected drawings, Greuze's among them. When the engraver Jacques Firmin Beauvarlet made a print after one of them around 1770, the lettering underneath said the drawing was in the cabinet of Monsieur Damery, knight of the royal and military order of Saint Louis. Damery stamped his own small mark on the sheets he owned, and a century later the writer and collector Edmond de Goncourt said it was never to be found on a mediocre drawing. Greuze painted the portrait around 1765 and gave the gold brocade, the lace and the velvet the same care as the face.