rights to land, wealth and title in which large extended families featured significantly (Pointon, 1993, 16–
33). They also laid claim to an association with the “highest” form of art, history painting.
In both painting and sculpture, commissions for grand portraiture provided a means of asserting the high
status of the “historical style.” In 1774 in France, the Comte d’Angiviller, recently appointed Director of
Public Buildings in France, set up a series of commissions of “grand style” paintings and sculptures
intended to celebrate the “great men” of France. The choice of subjects was determined by the royal
household and conveyed to Pierre, at the time First Painter to the King. The plan (ultimately uncompleted)
was to create works that might decorate the Grande Galérie at the Louvre, as there was already an
intention to open up the royal collections there to the public. The focus, intended as an appeal to national
sentiment, was on the great military figures, writers and magistrates of French history, and it was hoped
that such subjects would appeal to all France’s social “states” from the aristocracy and clergy to the
broader “third estate,” many of whom expressed an increasing interest in art. These commissions for
historical portrait sculpture focused on both ancient and more recent history. Clodion’s Montesquieu
(1783) (Figure 2.6) celebrates, for example, a recent philosopher and writer who had been at the heart of
the French Enlightenment. The Sèvres factory eventually used the models produced for this series, in
order to produce porcelain reproductions, demonstrating an interplay of “high” and artisanal visual
cultures.