Self-Portrait

Mignard painted himself in 1690, in his late seventies, the year he became First Painter to Louis XIV, and almost everything in the picture is a statement about what that painter should be. He sits in a high-backed chair holding a drawing stylus, because drawing was held to be the foundation of the whole art.

Around him are an architectural design for a column on the Pont-Neuf in Paris, small wax models tied to his work for Versailles, and books, among them La Bruyère's Characters, the sharp portrait of French society that had come out two years earlier. There is a bust of his daughter Catherine, and there are references to the dome he painted for the Val-de-Grâce church.

After his death in 1695, Catherine, by then Countess of Feuquières, gave the canvas to the Royal Academy of Painting, where it became the pendant to Largillière's portrait of Charles Le Brun, the man whose post Mignard had taken over.