Attributed to Donat Nonotte(1708-1785).Presumed portrait of Marguerite Catherine Haynault

Attributed to Donat Nonotte (1708-1785). Presumed portrait of Marguerite Catherine Haynault, mistress of Louis XV.

Relined canvas, 85 cm x 91 cm.
Exceptional Regency frame, 112 cm x 98 cm.

Until now, we were familiar with the portrait of Mademoiselle Haynault painted by François Hubert Drouais around 1760 (MFA Boston, USA). She was then 23 or 25 years old. Our portrait was painted a few years later. It is difficult to say exactly how many, but let's say around 1765 or 1770. Unlike Drouais's portrait, Mademoiselle Haynault is depicted facing the viewer. She is dressed in a gray-blue satin gown whose silvery highlights accentuate the folds and the fineness of the fabric. Around her neck, she wears a multi-strand pearl necklace, adorned with a blue ribbon matching the one tied on her bodice. Her powdered hair is styled in an updo adorned with a ribbon of the same shade, pearls, and lace.

Marguerite Catherine Haynault, Marquise de Montmélas.

In 1759, at the age of 23, she became the mistress of King Louis XV and soon after gave birth to a daughter, Agnès-Louise de Montreuil, on May 20th of the following year. Agnès-Louise was officially the daughter of Marguerite Catherine Hainault (or Haynault) and a cavalry officer named Louis de Montreuil. In reality, the King of France was hiding behind this identity. She gave him another daughter in 1762, Anne-Louise de La Réale, who, like her older sister, was baptized under false names, officially the daughter of Marguerite Hainault and Antoine-Louis de La Réale, a former cavalry officer. Louis XV chose the revealing surname "Réal" (meaning "royal" in Spanish). Neglected by the king after the birth of her second daughter, Mademoiselle Hainault married Blaise Arod, Marquis de Montmelas, a brigadier in the King's armies, in 1766. He was eight years younger than her. They had no children. Marguerite's daughters were raised apart from their mother: they were educated together at the convent of Chaillot. In August 1774, a few months after their father's death, the new king, Louis XVI, granted them letters of nobility. For each of them, the Beloved had established a capital of 223,000 livres, thus ensuring them an annual income of 24,300 livres. The same was true for the other illegitimate children of Louis XV.

Donat Nonotte (1708-1785)

Born in Besançon in 1708, Donat Nonnotte (sometimes called Donatien) showed a marked talent for drawing and the human figure from a very young age. He left his native province for Paris, where he became a pupil of the great François Lemoyne, painter to the king and decorator of the Apollo vault at the Palace of Versailles. In Lemoyne's studio, Nonnotte learned the grace of modeling and the subtlety of flesh tones: a legacy he would later transpose into his own portraiture. Admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1741 thanks to a portrait of a fellow artist, he gradually established himself as a sought-after portraitist. His works captivated with their silvery light, their shimmering fabrics, and his gentle, restrained way of painting faces: neither flattered nor idealized, but imbued with a quiet benevolence. Around the middle of the century, Nonnotte settled in Lyon, then a prosperous and cultured city, where he became the king's official painter. There he found a large clientele: magistrates, notables, women of high society, and members of the clergy. In Lyon, he embodied a refined and moral style of painting, reflecting an enlightened bourgeoisie in search of understated elegance. His workshop trained several students and helped spread Parisian taste throughout the provinces. His style combined the light, silky colors of the Rococo with a more stable and refined composition. The delicately modeled faces are bathed in soft light; the fabrics—gray-blue satins, dark velvets, and light furs—demonstrate a mastery of rendering textures. Nonnotte died in Lyon in 1785, at the age of seventy-seven, after a prolific and respected career.