* Louis-Michel van Loo Toulon 1707 - 1771 Paris

J.J. Devin, Paris, remained in the Devin residence, Hotel de Chenizot, Paris, until 1882;
Annel collection, Longueil-Annel, near Compiègne, until 1940 (hidden in Brittany with a consignment of furniture from the Chateau d'Annel 1940-45 returned to Paris, 1945);
Thence by descent in the family;
By whom sold, Monte Carlo, Sotheby's, 20 June, 1987, lot 396, there purchased by Heim Gallery
With Heim Gallery, London, where acquired by the Museum in 1989.

Hanover, New Hampshire, Dartmouth College, Hood Museum of Art; Toledo, Ohio, The Toledo Museum of Art; Houston, Texas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Intimate Encounters, Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, 1997-98, catalogue by R. Rand, cat. no. 33

The present portrait depicts Jean-Jacques Julien, Comte Devin (1731-1817), his first wife, Elisabeth Françoise Angelique Rousseau (1743-1770), and their son, Jean-Jacques Devin, Marquis de Fontenay (1762-1817). Comte Devin was a president of the Paris Parlement, held the title of sécretaire du Roi, and was appointed a director of the Caisse d'escompte in 1767, the same year this portrait was painted. As Richard Rand points out (see Exhibited below), the Devin family were members of an arriviste class of bureaucrats who purchased their nobility. Van Loo has presented them in a charming and idealized scene of domestic bliss, their wealth and status conveyed in the sumptuousness of their garments and their lavish furnishings.

The critic, Denis Diderot, whose own portrait was painted by van Loo in the same year (Musée du Louvre), praised, in particular, his portrayal of family groups- “Michel Van Loo est vraiment un artiste: il entend la grande machine; témoins quelque tableaux de famille où les figures sont grandes comme nature et louables par toutes les parties de la peinture ("Michel Van Loo is truly an artist: he understands the grand production; witness some of his family pictures, where the figures are as large as life, and which are laudable in all aspects of painting.”) [Diderot, Salon de 1767, in J. Seznac and J. Adhémar, Diderot Salons, 1967, vol. 3, p. 69].