Portrait of a gentleman, half length, seated at a desk in a library

When this portrait last appeared at auction in 1994 it was attributed to Louis-Michel van Loo (loc. cit.), and only recently has it been restored to the ouevre of Marianne Loir. Marianne was from a long line of notable Parisian silversmiths, engravers and painters; her brother, Alex Loir III, was a highly regarded sculptor and pastellist. She was trained by the celebrated academic painter, Jean-François de Troy. Though little is known of Loir's life, she is recorded as working in Paris and Pau, and was elected to the Académie de Marseilles in 1762. She may also have spent time in Rome, in the mid-1730s and early 1740s, following de Troy who was serving as the director of the Académie de France in Rome at the time. Loir produced many portraits of the French nobility and intellegentsia. Many of her male sitters are depicted seated at desks, surrounded by books and writing implements, as in the present portrait, and similarly in an example sold at Tajan, Paris (23 June 2009, lot 47), and another now in the Portland Museum of Art (inv. no. 2013.87.1).

We are grateful to Le Conservatoire du Portrait du XVIIIe siècle for endorsing the attribution on the basis of photographs (private communication 14 April 2024).