The Comte de Vaudreuil

In 1758 France was two years into the Seven Years' War, fighting Britain and Prussia at once, and this 18-year-old officer had already been at the battle of Rossbach, a heavy French defeat. Drouais paints him indoors, though his armour lies on the floor beside him. What he points to is a map of Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the Caribbean island now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He was born there, his father had governed it, and his fortune came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved people. Drouais has hung that map over another one, of the German lands where the war was being fought, as if to say the colony mattered just as much. The rest is the dress of a rich young man, a blue velvet coat lined with squirrel fur, gold and silver lace, and the red heels of an aristocrat.