page_title: Louis René Vialy
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Louis René Vialy / Life
caption_attribution_description: Signature de Louis René Vialy
context_page_description: Louis-René Vialy, also spelled Vially, Viali or Viallis, was a French painter.
context_section_description: The son of Jacques Vialy, a Sicilian painter born at Trapani but who moved to Provence, Louis-René Vialy was born at Aix-en-Provence.  He began his career decorating sedan chairs, as attested by Mariette, who wrote that "it was a very popular taste in Provence to have ornamented sedan chairs". His father was naturalised as a French subject by letters registered at the cour des comptes of Aix-en-Provence in 1720 and died in Aix on 25 December 1745 aged 95. He was buried the following day in the old parish church of La Madeleine, beside Jean-Baptiste van Loo who had died on 29 September the same year.
  Louis-René at first studied under his father and very often attended the Vernets' studio - Antoine Vernet, decorative painter, was a family friend of Louis's father. Louis-René is normally named as the tutor of the young marine painter Joseph Vernet but this was actually Jacques. Louis-René in 1752 painted a pastel portrait of Vernet and owned several paintings by him, such as the two exhibited at the 1757 Salon. Mariette also cites him as tutor to the engraver Jean-Joseph Balechou.
  Vialy seems to have set himself up in Paris around 1750,in rue d’Argenteuil, behind the Church of Saint-Roch. His style as a portrait painter influenced and was influenced by the salons of the Académie Royale de Saint-Luc, where he exhibited in 1752, 1753 and 1756 with the titles "peintre du Roi" and member of Académie de Saint-Luc. At first, however, he worked for the famous portraitist Hyacinthe Rigaud, in whose studio he was found in 1712 and in 1714 under the name "Vial". He was then only 32. This trip does not seem today to be apochryphal, for relationships are known between the Catalan painter and the Van Loo family, during his trip to Lyons then to Paris. On his death, Louis-René Vialy was still on rue des Aveugles, in the parish of Saint Sulpice, above a barber's shop.
caption: Signature of Vialy (1751)
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