François Desportes (1661–1743), a remarkable French artist specializing in painting animals and hunting scenes, stayed in Warsaw for less than two years (1695–1696), but still managed to leave his mark on the late 17th-century Polish painting.
Born in Champagne to a peasant family, François was first an apprentice of the animalier Bernaerts, active in Paris, and then furthered his training at a befriended portraitist, François de Troy. Initially, Desportes was employed as a decorator in castles of French aristocratic families and for Louis XIV himself who appointed the artist his court painter and also gave his consent for the artist’s voyage to Poland. The French envoy to Warsaw and the abbot of Bonport, l’abbé de Polignac introduced Desportes to Jan III Sobieski and his court.
François soon became the key and the most sought-after portraitist. His very first commission was a portrait of Jan III, favourably received by the monarch and later exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1794. Unfortunately, the portrait remains unknown. In 1696 Desportes painted a portrait of Marie Casimire, complying with Her majesty’s wish that, “the effigy show her as she used to be, while retaining the current resemblance”. The unquestionably idealized and yet one of the finest of the queen’s portraits was fully approved of by Sobieska who, “stamped her seal on the back of the painting and signed it (...) for reassurance”. Until 1977 the work was in Staatsgemäldesammlung in Munich, and currently it forms part of the collection of the Royal Castle in Warsaw. Desportes presumably created copies of the portrait in the form of replica(s?); it is hard to imagine the queen ever parting with her only portrait she truly liked.
According to Claude Desportes, the artist’s son, his father also made portraits of Sobieskis’ children, two of the queen’s father Cardinal Henri de la Grange d’Arquien (one of which, sent as a gift to the Pope, was reproduced in form of a copperplate engraving by Robert Audenaerde, and the other was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1704), as well as effigies of various Polish voivodes and senators. Many of these paintings are believed to have been reproduced as prints. Regretfully, all the rich output remains virtually unknown, or perhaps simply unidentified as Desportes had a habit of leaving his works unsigned. Possible attributions put forward by Polish scholars (e.g. Tadeusz Mańkowski attributes to Desportes a portrait of Madame de Béthune) remain doubtful and controversial.
Summoned by Louis XIV to return to France, awarded with a royal salary, accommodation in the Louvre and commissioned to decorate royal residences with paintings on animal-related topics, Desportes eventually gave up portraiture. The only exception he made was his self-portrait in a hunter’s dress which had him admitted as a member of the Academy in 1699.
