Francois Van Loo

François van Loo was part of the van Loo family, a grand dynasty of painters from Flanders who left their mark on European painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. François van Loo’s precocious talent and early artistic successes promised a spectacular career, but the artist’s early death deprived history of an abundance of work. Aged 20, he reached the city of Rome in 1728 in the company of the young François Boucher, his brother Louis-Michel, and his uncle Carle. At the Mancini Palace, where he resided for four years at the expense of his father, Jean-Baptiste, and under the protection of the Duke of Antin, he was introduced among the greatest French artists of his time: Edme Bouchardon, Pierre-Charles Trémolières, and Pierre Subleyras who became his friend. Four years later, Carle van Loo was forced to leave Rome under pressure from the director of the Académie de France, Nicolas Vleughels, who took a dim view of his plan to marry a woman of the people. Carle fled to Florence and was quickly joined by his nephew François. Together, they left for Torino but François fell on horseback. Seriously injured, he died in the Piedmontese capital in 1732, at only 24 years old. He left behind him a restricted but nevertheless remarkable corpus. Dandré-Bardon underlined in 1765 that he “was born with the finest genius, and had signaled it early in his distinguished works. Several ingenious drawings of invention & from nature; various figures painted in a more beautiful tone, with an admirable brush and with the greatest ease”.