‘No Picture more Charming’: The Family Portrait in Eighteenth‐Century France

During the eighteenth century, so it is conventionally argued, the family portrait underwent a decisive transformation. Hitherto stiff and formal, such pictures took on a new informality and intimacy in response to the rise of a new set of domestic ideals. In the case of French family portraiture, this narrative has continued to be rehearsed in a largely uncritical way. What has not been adequately grasped to date is the way that such pictures functioned to legitimate the sitters and, more particularly, the male head of the family in the eyes of an external beholder. Although sometimes commissioned by a royal or noble family in response to a dynastic crisis, they most often functioned to consolidate the social ascent of wealthy commoners. The changes that the family portrait underwent during this period are bound up with the shift of political authority away from the absolute monarch towards the public sphere.