Exhibition: Duplessis – The art of painting life

The programme

This event will highlight the work of this exceptional artist and offer a unique immersion into his artistic universe.
The exhibition will bring together, among the 200 paintings he painted, some sixty works from prestigious collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Palace of Versailles and the Louvre Museum. These key pieces will allow visitors to discover or rediscover Duplessis's virtuosity, particularly his role as official portraitist to Louis XVI. This first retrospective exhibition of this master of portraiture will be accompanied by a catalogue of Duplessis's work, listing nearly two hundred paintings (published by Lienart éditions).

Duplessis's talent was recognized by his contemporaries, who considered him "the greatest portrait painter in the kingdom." It was his brush that immortalized the features of historical figures, and his works are present in major French and international museums. To mark the 300th anniversary of his birth in Carpentras, his hometown wished to bring out of the shadows the artist behind these famous portraits by presenting sixty of the two hundred works attributed to him. Coming from all over the world, these paintings demonstrate the diversity of Duplessis's work. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and a portraitist to the Court, developing a Parisian and provincial clientele while maintaining a close connection with the elites of the Comtat Venaissin. But one constant emerges from his work, from his history paintings preserved in the cathedral of Carpentras to his final self-portrait painted on the eve of his death: that of his talent for illuminating faces and capturing the life emanating from each of these characters.