Study of Hands

In 1708 the painter and theorist Roger de Piles published his Course of Painting by Principles, and in it he argued that after the face it is the hands that show what a person thinks and feels. A few years later, around 1715, Nicolas de Largillière covered this canvas with nothing but hands. It is a practice sheet in oil, hands turned at different angles, some bare and some coming out of lace cuffs, none of them attached to a finished figure.

Largillière painted some 1,500 portraits with the help of a workshop, and hands like these can be matched to poses in several of his finished pictures. The canvas belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Algiers, which bought it in 1950, and it has hung in the Louvre as that museum's deposit since 1970.