Portrait of Cardinal Guillaume Dubois (1723): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Cardinal Guillaume Dubois (1723) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Hyacinthe Rigaud (French, 1659–1743).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

With his luxurious, flamboyant dress—a voluminous wrap of scarlet silk topped by a short fur cape—the subject of Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait was clearly a man of consequence. Guillaume Dubois gained the favor of Louis XIV as tutor to his nephew, Philippe Charles, Duke of Orléans, and served as chief minister under Louis’s successors, the regent Duke of Orléans and Louis’s great-grandson, Louis XV. Dubois was appointed a Cardinal in the Catholic Church in 1721, a lofty aspiration at least partly motivated by political ambition: the title gave him the ability to remove political adversaries with impunity. Dubois holds a letter with the words Au Roy (to the king); this portrait was painted in the same year the young Louis XV ascended to the throne.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Cardinal Guillaume Dubois
• Date: 1723
• Creator attribution: Hyacinthe Rigaud (French, 1659–1743)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 180.5 x 148 x 15 cm (71 1/16 x 58 1/4 x 5 7/8 in.); Unframed: 146.7 x 113.7 cm (57 3/4 x 44 3/4 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1967.17

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Perreau, Stéphan. Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743): catalogue concis de l'oeuvre. Sète, France: Nouvelles Presses de Languedoc, 2013.
• Hôtel Drouot. Tableaux anciens…Par ou attribués à: J. Aved – Moreau L’Ainé – A. van der Neer – H. Rigaud et des écoles anglaise, française et hollandaise appartenant à divers amateurs. Dec. 10, 1956.
• Alison Cathie, letter to Ann Tzeutschler Lurie, Feb. 22, 1972, in CMA curatorial file.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.