Self-Portrait

By 1666 Robert Nanteuil was the busiest portraitist at the court of Louis XIV, yet nearly everything he made was meant to be printed, engraved onto copper plates that carried the king's face across France. This piece is the exception, a self-portrait in soft pastel worked directly from the face in front of him. Six years earlier he had helped win a royal decree that ranked engraving among the liberal arts rather than a manual trade, a rare promotion for a printmaker. The likeness later came to Florence for the Medici collection of artists' self-portraits, where Nanteuil is one of the few French names. He was in his early forties here, at the height of a practice that turned out more than 200 engraved portraits.