page_title: Jean Ranc
section_title: Style
hierarchical_section_title: Jean Ranc / Style
context_page_description: Jean Ranc was a French painter, mainly active in portraiture. He trained under his father Antoine Ranc and his father's former student Hyacinthe Rigaud and served in the courts of both Louis XV of France and Philip V of Spain.
context_section_description: Ranc had a close relationship with Rigaud; in addition to Ranc's being Rigaud's pupil and married to his niece, Rigaud had been a student of Ranc's father, Antoine. Ranc's style is thus considerably indebted to Rigaud's and works by him have sometimes been misattributed to Rigaud or to others. For example, when sent to auction at the Hôtel Drouot in 1993, his portraits of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson and his wife were wrongly attributed to Rigaud and said to represent the President of La Mésangère and his wife; they came back on the Venetian art market attributed to Largillierre, who had painted the latter couple in three quarters bust. The male portrait proved to be an exact replica of Ranc's portrait of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, while the portrait of his wife followed the formula of Rigaud's portrait of Madame Le Gendre de Villedieu, illustrating the close relationship between their styles.
  In his 1710 portrait of Joseph Delaselle, a merchant and arms-dealer from Nantes (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes) Ranc used Rigaud's vocabulary of drapery and a relaxed pose in a rural landscape. His 1719 portrait of the nine-year-old Louis XV in royal costume (Musée de l'Histoire de France, Palace of Versailles, right) echoes Rigaud's portrait of the five-year-old Louis (also at Versailles). The imitation is such that Ranc uses not only similar regalia, but also the heavy drape animating the scene, the column and the ermine mantle. Later, in his portraits of members of the Spanish court, Ranc would imitate Rigaud's style even more closely, but with less suppleness and vitality.
  Ranc made use of military posture and details drawn from Rigaud for a portrait of Daniel-François de Gélos de Voisins d’Ambres, comte de Lautrec: the baton decorated with the fleur-de-lys, the flowing drapery, the extended hand, the tree trunk, and the battle scene. This work's attribution to Ranc has sometimes been questioned, and another version and its female pendant have been attributed to Jean-Marc Nattier (Geneva, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire) but this portrait definitely shows Rigaud's influence, if not on Ranc then on an assistant in the atelier. Ranc's style was very close to that of Rigaud, but can be readily distinguished by the very slender hands and especially the sharp folds in the draperies which appear in his works; Rigaud's draperies are much softer and more malleable. Ranc's portraits show a lack of spontaneity in the depiction of the sitters, caused by an over-precise technique. Rigaud's faces are extraordinarily lifelike, however Ranc excelled in the pageantry and colour of his art.
caption: Portrait of Louis XV as a child (Musée de l'Histoire de France, Palace of Versailles)
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