NICOLAS DE LARGILLIERRE | PORTRAIT OF MADAME TITON, NÉE MARGUERITE BÉCAILLE

Anonymous sale, Paris, Tajan, 9 December 1999, lot 60;

There acquired by the present collector. 

M. N. Rosenfeld, Largillierre and the Eighteenth Century Portrait, Montreal 1982, pp. 37-8.  

ENGRAVED

Louis Desplaces, 1715 (fig. 1).

Marguerite Bécaille was the wife of Maximilien Titon, Director of Armaments for Louis XIV, and the mother of the writer Evrard Titon du Tillet (1677-1762), who was one of Largillierre's closest friends and most important patrons. Their friendship was commemorated in a poem published in the Mercure de France in May 1746, titled Ode en strophes libres à M. Titon du Tillet sur la mort de M. de Largillierre, chancelier, ancien directeur de l'Academie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture [1].

1. Mercure de France, May 1746, p. 234.