The Lit de Justice Held at the Parlement of Paris for the Majority of Louis XV (22 February 1723)

On 22 February 1723, a week after his 13th birthday, Louis XV came to the Parlement of Paris to be declared of age, 13 being the legal majority of French kings. The session was a lit de justice, a solemn sitting at which the king presided in person over his judges, and it formally closed the regency the Duke of Orléans had run since the death of Louis XIV in 1715. Nicolas Lancret, whose trade was elegant parties in parkland, painted the ceremony that same year, a subject quite unlike the rest of his work. Its companion, a ceremony of the Order of the Holy Spirit, is in the Louvre as well. The magistrates' scarlet robes fill the benches under the gilded ceiling of the Grand Chamber, and on the right-hand wall hangs the Crucifixion that watched over that room, the altarpiece known as the Retable du Parlement de Paris, now also in the Louvre. His widow still owned the canvas when she died, and it was sold in 1782.