RIGAUD Hyacinthe (1659-1743), French painter, born at Perpignan 20th July 1659, was the descendant of a line of painters. Having early lost his father, he was sent by his mother to Montpellier, where he studied under Pezet and was helped by Ranc, then to Lyons, and in 1681 to Paris. There, whilst following the regular course of academical instruction, Rigaud produced a great number of portraits so good that Lebrun advised him to give up going to Rome and to devote himself wholly to this class of work. Rigaud, although he had obtained the Great Prize, followed this advice, and for sixty-two years painted at the rate of thirty to forty portraits a year, all carried through with infinite care by his own hand. He had a magnificent emphatic manner appropriate to the rendering of the pompous types of the age, but, although some of his most famous works belong to the class of official portraiture, his talent showed to even greater advantage in the painting of subjects whose life and position admitted of less formal treatment. His portraits of himself, of the sculptor Desjardins (Louvre), of Mignard, and of Lebrun (Louvre) may be cited as triumphs of a still more attractive, if less imposing, character than that displayed in his grand representations of Bossuet (Louvre) and Louis XIV. (Louvre), while his beautiful portraits of his mother, Marie Serre...