Portrait of the President of Estanville as a Vestal Virgin by Marianne Loir

This portrait is listed as that of Madame d’Estanville in the 1954 inventory, spelt ‘D’estenivelle’. It belonged to Caroline Costaz-Onslow, sister-in-law of the Marquis de Pierre, as evidenced by one of the photographs of her townhouse in Fontainebleau.

Madame d’Estanville, née de Jarente, was the daughter of Balthazar-Alexandre de Jarente, Marquis de Senas, and Élisabeth Rambaud de Saint-Maurice. In 1764 , she married Nicolas de Mahiel d’Estanville, President of the Requêtes at the Parliament of Rouen. She was related to the Countess Marguerite Alexandrine d’Ourches (1767–c. 1835), mother of Caroline Costaz-Onslow, the sister-in-law of the Marquis de Pierre, from whom she bought the estate in 1862 in order to settle his debts.

This exquisitely executed portrait is one of many depictions of women as Vestal Virgins produced in the^18th century. These had been brought into fashion by the publication in 1725 of *An History of the Vestal Virgins with a Treatise on the Luxury of Roman Ladies* by Abbé Nadal. The Vestal Virgins thus entered the collective imagination of the^18th century, resonating with the taste for antiquity and deeper fantasies.

In these works , the Vestal Virgins are depicted wearing the suffibulum, a white piece of fabric resembling a bride’s veil. The chaste, immaculate stola is often enhanced by iridescent sheens, whilst the sacred fire of Vesta burns in the background, lending the portraits a subtle eroticism, somewhere between fire and ice. Aesthetically, the purity of the drapery and the restraint of the pose appealed to visual artists as a reaction against the excesses of the Rococo.

As early as 1748, the trend was set at court by the portrait of Madame Sophie (1734–1782), the sixth daughter of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska, by Jean-Marc Nattier (1685–1766), official portraitist to the House of Orléans and later to the court of Louis XV. In his comments on the 1759 Salon, Denis Diderot noted all the ambiguities in Nattier’s pictorial treatment of such a subject: ‘Here isa Vestal Virgin by Nattier; and you will imagine youth, innocence, candour, loose hair, a drape with broad folds, drawn back over the head and concealing part of the forehead; a touch of pallor; for pallor befits piety (and tenderness). None of that, but instead an elegant hairstyle, a sophisticated fit, all the affectation of a society lady at her dressing table, and eyes full of sensuality, to say the least.”

This fashion persisted at least until the Revolution. The Marquise de Pompadour, Louis XV’s official mistress, showed no lack of humour when she, in turn, had herself painted as a vestal virgin by François-Hubert Drouais (1727–1775) around 1763 (Montréal, David M. Stewart Museum), particularly as she was no longer in an intimate relationship with the king by that time. She holds in her hands Abbé Nadal’s*Histoire des Vestales*, thereby also recalling the scholarly origins of this fashion, from the perspective of a mistress who certainly knew how to keep the sacred flame alive in Louis XV’s heart. Drouais continued in this vein with a portrait of a young, as yet unidentified woman, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which plays heavily on the innocent eroticism of the unknown subject. Finally, the painters Louis-Michel (1707–1771) and Jean-Baptiste van Loo (1684–1745) also produced numerous portraits of women as Vestal Virgins, as did Marianne Loir (c. 1715–1769), as demonstrated by a portrait that appeared at public auction in 2001 (Drouot auction, Paris, 5 December 2001).

A close examination of this portrait of a woman as a Vestal Virgin by Marianne Loir – particularly the rendering of the hands, but also the depiction of the fabrics – reveals significant similarities with the Aulteribe portrait, which therefore appears to be attributable to the painter. The granddaughter of the Parisian painter and engraver Nicolas Loir (1624–1679), and sister of the sculptor Alexis III Loir (1712–1785), Marianne Loir trained under Jean-François de Troy (1679–1752), then director of the Académie de France in Rome, where she lived between 1738 and 1746. Admitted to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Marseille in 1762, she led a nomadic career, which explains why her portraits are scattered across several museums. As ten portraits by Marie-Anne Loir are signed and dated from the period 1745–1769, it is likely that the painting of Aulteribe was produced during those same years.

Michel Delon, ‘Mythology of the Vestal Virgin’, Dix-huitième Siècle, no. 27, 1995, pp. 159–170.