Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra (Catalan pronunciation: [ʒəˈsin riˈɣaw ˈrɔz i ˈsɛrə]; 18 July 1659 – 29 December 1743), known in French as Hyacinthe Rigaud (pronounced [jasɛ̃t ʁiɡo]), was a French baroque painter most famous for his portraits of Louis XIV and other members of the French nobility.
Born in the province of Roussillon, Jacint Rigau, whose name was Frenchified to Hyacinthe Rigaud, is considered one of the most celebrated French portrait painters of the classical period. According to Jacques Thuillier, professor at the Collège de France: "Hyacinthe Rigaud was one of those French painters who, under the Ancien Régime, achieved the highest fame as portraitists. This admiration was deserved both for the abundance of his output and for its constant perfection."
Rigaud owes his fame to the loyalty of the Bourbon dynasty, whose likenesses he painted across four generations. He drew most of his clientele from the wealthiest circles, among the bourgeoisie, financiers, nobles, industrialists, and ministers. His body of work provides an almost complete gallery of portraits of the leaders of the Kingdom of France between 1680 and 1740. A smaller part of his production, however, consists of more modest sitters: relatives, friends, artists, or ordinary merchants.
Inseparable from his famous 1701 Portrait of Louis XIV in Coronation Robes, Rigaud associated with all the great ambassadors of his century and several European monarchs. The exact number of paintings by the artist remains disputed, since his catalogue is extensive, but specialists agree that he painted more than a thousand different sitters. To this must be added the large number of copies recorded in the artist's account book, which nonetheless does not mention several hundred other canvases discovered since its publication in 1919.
Grandson of gilder painters in Roussillon, trained in his father's tailoring workshop, Hyacinthe Rigaud honed his skills under Antoine Ranc in Montpellier starting in 1671, before moving to Lyon four years later. It was in these two cities that he became familiar with Flemish, Dutch, and Italian painting, that of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Titian, whose works he later collected.
Arriving in Paris in 1681, he won the Prix de Rome in 1682, but did not make the trip to Rome, on the advice of Charles Le Brun. Admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1700, he rose through every rank of that institution until his resignation in 1735.
According to the French art writer Louis Hourticq: "In dying, Rigaud left behind a gallery of great figures with whom our imagination now populates the Hall of Mirrors; Rigaud is essential to the glory of Louis XIV, and he shares in the radiance of a reign whose majesty he captured." True "photographs", faces that Diderot called "letters of recommendation written in a language common to all men", Rigaud's works now populate the greatest museums in the world.
Rigaud was born in Perpignan, then part of the Principality of Catalonia, a few months before the Monarchy of Spain ceded the city to France under the Treaty of the Pyrenees (7 November 1659). His family, the Rigau, were Catalan; he was the son of a tailor, the grandson of painter-gilders from Roussillon, and the elder brother of Gaspard Rigaud, also a painter.
Rigaud was baptised with his Catalan name in the old Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Perpignan on 20 July 1659, two days after his birth at rue de la Porte-d'Assaut. His baptismal name was Jyacintho Rigau or Jacint Rigau i Ros This is sometimes transliterated as Híacint Francesc Honrat Mathias Pere Martyr Andreu Joan Rigau After the Roussillon and the Cerdanya were ceded to France the following 7 November owing to the Treaty of the Pyrenees, the Rigau remained in Roussillon, and became French subjects.
He was trained in tailoring in his father's workshop, but perfected his skills as a painter under Antoine Ranc at Montpellier from 1671 onwards, before moving to Lyon four years later. It was in these cities that he became familiar with Flemish, Dutch and Italian painting, particularly that of Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Titian, whose works he later collected. Arriving in Paris in 1681, he won the prestigious scholarship known as the prix de Rome in 1682, but on the advice of Charles Le Brun did not make the trip to Rome which was included in the scholarship. Rigaud was received into the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1710, and he rose to the top of this institution before retiring from it in 1735.
Since Rigaud's paintings captured very exact likenesses along with the subject's costumes and background details, his paintings are considered precise records of contemporary fashions.
Hyacinthe's father, Josep Matias Pere Ramon Rigau, was a tailor in the parish of Saint-Jean de Perpignan, "as well as a painter", descended from a line of well-established artists in the Perpignanian basin who had been commissioned to decorate several tabernacles and other panels for liturgical use. Few of these have survived to the present (Palau-del-Vidre, Perpignan, Montalba-d'Amélie, Joch...). Hyacinthe's grandfather, Jacinto major, and even more Jacinto's father, Honorat minor, were heads of the family and the local art world from 1570 to 1630; probably as much as gilders as painters, since in their studios were to be found "many prints and books treating on the art of painting, and other things, such as brushes and palettes for painting".
Working for the collège Saint-Éloi in his city since 1560, and acting as representative of its guild of painters and gilders, on 22 November 1630 Jacinto major and other gilders and colleagues participated in the development of the statutes and minutes of the city's collège Saint-Luc
. Honorat minor is generally identified as the painter of The Canonisation of Saint Hyacinthe, formerly in Perpignan's Dominican convent and now at Joch, the tabernacle of the church of Palau-del-Vidre (28 March 1609) and the retable at Montalba near Amélie-les-Bains. The father of Honorat minor is generally identified as the painter of the retable of Saint-Ferréol (1623) in the église Saint-Jacques de Perpignan and formerly in the couvent des Minimes, whilst Honorat major is usually identified as the painter of the paintings of the retable of the église Saint-Jean-l'Évangéliste at Peyrestortes.
On 13 March 1647, Hyacinthe's father Matias Rigau married Thérèse Faget (1634–1655), daughter of a carpenter. Widowed shortly after, he decided to speedily remarry, to Maria Serra, daughter of a Perpignan textile merchant (pentiner in Catalan), on 20 December 1655. In 1665, he acquired a house "en lo carrer de las casas cremades" (now rue de l'Incendie, near the cathedral) and received the income from a parcel of vineyards in the Bompas territory. By his second marriage, he also acquired a house on place de l'Huile, but he soon sold it.
Little is known about Rigaud's activities in Lyon, due to the lack of surviving documents. However, as per tradition, artists from Montpellier had strong ties with this city, as had, for example, Samuel Boissière who was trained in there, in Lyon. The identity of Rigaud's future depicted models shows that he worked for the city's cloth merchants, whose flourishing trade had long since given the city its profitable income.
Even if they had only been registered from 1681 onwards, the date when he moved to Paris, his "youthful" portraits were probably pre-dated, like those of Antoine Domergue, the king's councillor and provincial governor of Lyon, in 1686, and "Mr Sarazin de Lion", of a famous dynasty of bankers of Swiss origins, in 1685. Rigaud's portrait of Jean de Brunenc, painted in 1687, a silk merchant, banker and consul of Lyon, assembles all the ingredients for which the painter was later successful.
In her thesis on the engravers from the Drevet family, Gilberte Levallois-Clavel revealed certain aspects of the private relations between Rigaud and Pierre Drevet; their friendship came about at the beginning of the 1700s, after the painter produced a portrait of the engraver, in which he depicted himself as well.