Portrait of a young gentleman, probably the comte d'Artois, later King Charles X of France (1757-1836), half-length, in a blue velvet coat and blue and silver lattice-embroidered waistcoat, with the sash of the Order of the Saint Esprit and the badge of the Order of the Golden Fleece

Although the present portrait type seems previously unrecorded, the physignomy of the sitter, the Orders he wears and the pairing of this and the subsequent lot strongly support the traditional identification of the sitter as comte d'Artois (1757-1836), the youngest brother of Louis XVI, who ruled France as Charles X between 1824 and 1830, when he was overthrown in the July Revolution. It was before his brief reign as King, however, that he exercised the greatest influence as a patron of the arts. Chief among the beneficiaries of his artistic patronage was the architect and designer François-Joseph Bélanger, who decorated several of his residences in Paris and elsewhere, as well as the painters Hubert Robert, François-Hubert Drouais, Louis-Michel van Loo and Jacques-Louis David, whose painting of Paris and Helen was commissioned by the comte.
The famous painting by François-Hubert Drouais of The Comte d'Artois and his sister, Madame Clotilde (Louvre, Paris, inv. no. 4114) is dated 1763 and shows him just a couple of years younger than in the present lot.